How It All Goes Down
- "Dear Franklin" (1.1), begins Chapter 1. Who's Franklin? Benjamin Franklin? Franklin D. Roosevelt? Franklin the Turtle?
- Whoever is writing this letter is writing about a day at the grocery store.
- The letter-writer seems to be agoraphobic, so just venturing into public is a big deal.
- Unfortunately, our letter-writer bumped into someone she didn't want to see: Mary Woolford.
- It seems that our writer, or someone she knows, did something to Mary in the past.
- Our writer hides in the canned food aisle until Mary leaves, then returns to the shopping cart.
- At the checkout, the checkout girl makes a big point of checking our narrator's ID and reading out the last name: "Khatchadourian."
- Khatchadourian makes it home and describes the home in the letter. To keep it short: it's a pit.
- Our narrator remembers the last house she lived in, and how someone vandalized it with red paint after whatever Kevin did. When are we going to talk about Kevin?
- Kevin is Eva Khatchadourian's son, and Eva is the one writing the letters. That's one mystery solved.
- Eva talks about selling the paint-spattered house after cleaning off the paint herself.
- Eva imagines that the house was purchased because of its notoriety—it was the house of a young killer who did something that "wasn't quite as bad as Columbine" (1.47).
- No wonder Eva had to move.