Part 1: Birthday Cake and a Gun: Chapter 1-2: Shark Behavior, The Prisoner's Dilemma Summary

Readers first meet Colin Fischer in a page from his much-loved Notebook: he is a freshman in high school with only 1,365 days left. He ponders a group of hammerhead sharks near the Galapagos Islands, who join together in a school unlike other species of shark. Scientists cannot deter the reason for this unusual behavior, and Colin wonders if anyone outside the school itself can ever know why the sharks do what they do.

Colin navigates from his locker to the boys' bathroom at school, trying to avoid touching people, turned off by the blue of the bathroom sign and soap. He encounters Wayne Connelly, a boy twice his size, smiling at him. While he tries to determine what the...