Summary

In the brief Prologue, the narrator Icy Sparks explains how her mother ate crab apples when she was pregnant. This made Icy cool to the touch when she was birthed, leading to her name. Icy also inherited a deep nervousness from her father. Both of her parents passed away when she was at a young age.

In Chapter 1, Icy is 10 years old, and lives with her grandparents, who she calls Matanni (real name: Tillie Bedloe) and Patanni (real name: Virgil Bedloe). As Icy eats oatmeal with them for breakfast one morning, she points out how Matanni has hair growing on her upper lip. Matanni asks her to stop. Icy describes a feeling she often get that is like an itchiness inside her head, a feeling that can only be resolved if she locks herself in the family’s root cellar and “contorts...