“The Yard”

Elaborating on the hidden complexity of their relationship, Jessica muses on what she knows of her parents' lives prior to her birth. Though neither speaks about it openly, she finds hints now and then about their own histories with violence—her father's, whose temper flares in response to anything that might threaten his family, and her mother's, whose victimization at the hands of the men in her family heavily motivated her to marry at just seventeen in order to escape.

Jessica's own relationship with her father is informed by this fierce protectiveness throughout her childhood. He wants her to succeed at any cost, and she desperately wants to live up to his expectations. When she does well, he's effusive and adoring. Any small stumble or failure, though, sends him into a rage—by his measure, every small setback is a threat to her ongoing success, and it puts everything they've worked for as a family at risk. She learns to seek success not for its own sake, but for the sake of pacifying her father's temper. At the same time, and as a result, she learns to hide her failures from her father altogether.

She embarks on her freshman year at Tulane with the full family's optimism behind her, but soon finds herself on academic probation. For fear of upsetting them, she hides it from her parents until she's back home. For her sophomore year, she transfers to the State University of New York at Albany instead.

"Boys"

Jessica reflects on her early relationships—there was Jay, her high school boyfriend, with whom she has sex for the first time in his family's walk-up Brooklyn apartment. Before long he becomes incredibly possessive and fixates constantly on her whereabouts and whether she's lying to him about where she is.

When Jay leaves for college, Jessica—then sixteen—starts seeing Jack, who is twenty. She tells her parents he's eighteen to avoid their criticism, but they're uncomfortable nonetheless. After her mother looks in her backpack and finds a small pipe and some condoms one day, Jessica and her mother get into a fight. Her mother grounds her, telling her that if she keeps sleeping with boys, nobody will ever want to marry her. Jessica and Jack break up partway through Jessica’s senior year. When she graduates, Jessica learns that her friends have planned a celebratory European vacation together and have agreed not to tell her about it.

"College"

After leaving Tulane and enrolling in her new school in upstate New York, Jessica meets Paul through her drug dealer. They immediately strike up a relationship, and the two quickly bond over their similarities—they're both from Italian families in New York City, they've both transferred from other schools, and they're both smart but unsure of how to apply themselves. They take road trips, explore recreational drugs together, and eventually rent an apartment together in Albany.

Jessica begins taking courses in women's studies and finally feels that she has found some much-needed direction in her life and in her studies. She reflects on her recent success, much happier now than she'd been at Tulane—there, she'd been disengaged from academia entirely and spent much of her time with a volatile, abusive boyfriend named Kyle who had handled their breakup very poorly. Even with this newfound sense of peace, Jessica struggles to openly accept Paul's healthy, respectful love in the wake of her past experiences with men. Eventually, the two break up.

"Grilled Cheese"

Jessica starts seeing Carl, a man who works in finance. She wakes up one morning and realizes that the night prior, he had sex with her...