“Gecko is already squealing away from the curb, grooving on the burst of acceleration. It’s his favourite feeling—that boost of pure power, like a titanic hand propelling him forward.

This scene introduces Gecko for the first time. In contrast to much of the novel where Gecko is nonconfrontational and sees himself as a small cog in a much larger machine, here he exudes confidence and power. This also introduces us to his relationship with driving, which informs his journey through the novel in many ways.

“The Remsenville Correctional Facility is a medium-security adult prison with high walls, guard towers with fixed machine guns, and trained attack dogs at the gates. ‘What’s a fifteen-year-old doing in a place like this?’ Healy mutters.”

Gecko and Healy have just come from the juvenile detention center where Gecko was imprisoned, and they’ve entered a very different world. This is where we’ll also meet Arjay, an innocent man and the least deserving of all three boys to be kept in a place like this. Healy’s dialogue at the end of this quote highlights the contrast and sense of displacement.

Not that he’s got big dreams; dreams are for suckers. His old man taught him that lesson fairly early on. The jerk never understood that while shouting, smacking, and cursing the dreams out of Terence, he was also giving Terence a dream of a different sort—the dream of putting several hundred miles between himself and his father.”

Although this quote is presented as narration rather than dialogue, this comes in closer to Terence’s natural voice. Here we see the first hints of his backstory, the events that shaped him as a person, and his motivations for embarking on the path that he did.