Summary

Chapter 1 starts with the narrator, Iris, speaking to her grandfather on the shore. They talk about a whale, buried under the sand the two are sitting on (1). The grandfather shares how the whale was not “‘born deaf like we were,’” but was deaf all the same; both Iris and her grandfather have been deaf since birth (2). She moved to Houston in recent years and feels alienated at school as the only Deaf student. As chapter 2 begins, Ms. Conn, Iris’s teacher, issues her a tardy pass for being one minute late to class. Nina, a fellow student who “thought she knew sign language,” is assigned to catch Iris up (6). Iris feels patronized by how Ms. Conn and Nina treat her (7). Ms. Conn hands Iris back a poetry assignment, asking her to redo it because it “does not rhyme” (8), even though she explained in...