Messed up people have messed up beginnings.
Tanya wasn’t always a mess. She used to be brave, brilliant, Class President every year, and perfectly content with being alone. But one sixth-grade Rank Day in 1998, she discovers nobody likes her, and a darker side of her surfaces—one who would plot, steal, and lie.
A fifth grader’s lunch money goes missing, and Tanya organizes a fundraiser to recoup it. Suddenly, she finds herself surrounded by the three most visible school personalities—a curly class beauty queen, a rich kid, and a reformed bully. As she awkwardly navigates the demands of her new social life, the good girl charade continues. If her truth were to come out about her dark side, just how much… or who will she lose?
Fifteen years forward, Tanya is stuck in a behavioral facility, haunted by a voice and unable to go home to a husband who may or may not be real. Prodded by a therapist to join a writing group, she rewrites a thinly veiled memoir, starting from her one bad deed on that wretched Rank Day, year 1998.