high school years

The high school years are a decisive stretch of Shelby Anderson Barnum’s past: after reporting that Madison Jefferson’s father had sexually assaulted her, she faced rejection from a trusted friend and sustained harassment at school. The novel returns to this period in an explicitly marked flashback, showing how a place once associated with friends and ordinary classes becomes a setting of fear and public judgment. Earlier losses and Jungkook Jeon’s troubled adolescence broaden the period’s context, while later scenes show that its injuries continue to shape how both characters seek safety and connection.

Narrative placement and scope

The high-school episode is framed as an analepsis, or retrospective break in the present timeline. It opens at Theodore Roosevelt High School in Los Angeles, “Quelques années auparavant,” and ends when the narrative explicitly closes the flashback and returns to the Barnum house in Ellensburg on December 22. That clear boundary matters: the school scenes are not an uninterrupted account of Shelby’s adolescence, but a concentrated return to the experience that explains her later fear of being disbelieved.

The memory begins by setting past and present against each other. School had once been a place where Shelby found friends and attended classes with them; now she would do anything to escape it. She moves through the corridors hunched over, head lowered, conscious of classmates’ mocking, judgmental looks. When she reaches the girls’ bathroom, she locks herself in a stall. The transformation of a familiar communal setting into somewhere to hide makes social exclusion tangible before anyone speaks to her.

Shelby’s disclosure and the school’s response

The flashback connects the hostility at school to Shelby’s report against Madison’s father. She had spoken to Madison before making the complaint, but the disclosure did not secure her friend’s support. For three months Shelby had told no one else; she finally stopped maintaining that silence after Connor Barnum and Lydia noticed that something was troubling her. By then, she had also begun to grow apart from Madison. Her decision to speak is therefore presented as difficult and belated, not as an impulsive accusation.

The school corridor and bathroom scenes show the social cost of that decision. Shelby hears Madison and Caitlin laughing and calling her a slut and crazy for accusing Madison’s father and reporting him. Madison’s response, as Shelby later recounts it to Dorcas Peters, was to deny that her father could have committed such an act and to make a scene at school. The accusations invert the positions of victim and wrongdoer: Shelby, who reported harm, is treated as the person who has caused it.

The bathroom encounter escalates from insults to intimidation. When Shelby asks to be left alone, Madison answers with the claim that Shelby wanted to destroy her family because her father had refused her advances, then demands that she open the door. Shelby remains frozen inside as Madison and Caitlin pound on it. After they leave, she is still terrified; her breathing speeds up, her chest tightens, and sweat gathers on her forehead. The scene ends with the bodily effects of fear rather than with a resolution or public vindication.

Loss and the years before the flashback

The high-school period sits within a longer history of bereavement. In a later conversation with Sunmi Eun, Shelby recalls that her mother developed widespread cancer when Shelby was eight. She stayed beside her mother and tried to be her sunshine, despite being too young to bear the sight of her suffering; her mother eventually died. When Shelby begins to cry during the account, Sunmi gently holds and strokes her trembling hands, guides her breathing, and offers immediate reassurance. The scene links the later act of disclosure to a relationship in which Shelby can be heard without being blamed.

Shelby’s later despair gives further weight to the importance of her connection to her father. At one point she reflects that life feels unjust and not worth living, and imagines jumping from a cliff. She remains because she cannot abandon the father who has supported her, and because death has already burdened her family. This is not identified as a high-school scene; it shows instead that the novel’s account of Shelby’s distress extends beyond the flashback and that family attachment remains a restraint on her most dangerous thoughts.

Jungkook’s adolescence and the other side of the past

Jungkook’s past is revealed in separate memories rather than as part of Shelby’s school flashback. One takes place in Gangnam, Seoul, a few years earlier: when he is eight, his older brother Ye-jun holds him back from going downstairs to intervene in his parents’ argument. Jungkook is furious and crying, and struggles free when he senses his brother’s grip weaken. The episode places his anger inside a childhood shaped by conflict at home, while showing Ye-jun trying to protect him from danger.

Sunmi Eun later recalls the longer history behind Jungkook’s guardedness. As a child he appeared quiet and calm, but one day he returned to her home badly bruised. His father had beaten him; Jungkook claimed instead that he had fought at school and that Namjoon Kim had helped him. Sunmi believed that explanation at first. At sixteen, Jungkook ran away from home and sought refuge with her. She welcomed him without hesitation, and he remained grateful for her care. Her account also links his home life to risks beyond it: she worried about his behavior outside her house and about his contact with things no sixteen-year-old should have touched.

The period’s afterlife

The school flashback shows how institutional and social power can make reporting harm feel like another source of danger. Shelby describes the Jefferson family as influential and recalls that, after her father attacked Madison’s father, a trial followed but the family escaped consequences as though nothing had happened. In the school memory, wealth is likewise associated with the belief that no one can hold the Jeffersons accountable. The book thus places Shelby’s isolation within a broader imbalance, rather than presenting it as a private misunderstanding between former friends.

Later, Shelby directly challenges the logic that turns suspicion of some false claims into a reason to disbelieve real victims of rape or sexual assault. She argues that such reasoning makes victims feel guilty, keeps them silent, and prevents them from being taken seriously. That public refusal to accept victim-blaming contrasts with the locked bathroom door and the girl who could not move while others pounded on it. The high-school years remain significant not because they neatly explain away Shelby’s later pain, but because they show the social conditions under which speaking became perilous—and why being believed, listened to, and allowed to set the pace of disclosure matter so much afterward.