

She was chased by a swarm of bees and left her siblings behind. She remembered an incident from childhood when she was exploring a creek with her brother and sister. However, she only lasted two days, after which she went to her husband's office and begged him for the combination so she could retrieve her phone. She locked her phone inside and gave the combination to her husband, hoping to curtail her use of the portal during the day. For her birthday, she asked for a small safe. When she was away from the portal, she felt a sense of longing for it, as though she was missing something vital. The protagonist's sister told the family that she was pregnant.Ī school shooting caused the protagonist to feel further anxiety about the state of America and the future.

She recalled her brother, a military veteran, once telling her that he would protect her “when it all went to hell” (77), by which he meant in case of an apocalyptic event. At home for Christmas, the protagonist saw her siblings. and angry at her father, who supported the dictator. She felt depressed about the political situation in the U.S. She thought about how difficult it would be to explain things she had done or said on the portal to a hypothetical future child. The protagonist watched a video online from a “Nazi rally” (57) in which a white supremacist drove his car into a crowd of protesters, killing a woman. Most notably, European countries did not see the number of mass shootings that the United States did. and how their laws were different from her own. As she toured Europe, the protagonist gained insight into how different countries view the U.S. She believed fascist leaders were only a symptom of a larger problem within society-right-wing extremism. She thought about the possibility of going back in time to kill Hitler or the dictator when they were babies, but realized this would not prevent the violence that these men helped facilitate. After a series of racially-motivated brutality incidents, the protagonist tried to learn to hate the police like everyone else on the portal, but this was challenging for her because her father was a retired police officer. She was subsequently invited on a tour around the world to discuss the portal on panels and in classrooms. The protagonist became famous after one of her posts on the portal, reading, “Can a dog be twins?” (13) went viral. She contemplated the strange behavior that people engage in online and worried about the stability of the United States, which was being governed by a “dictator” (4). In Part I, the protagonist scrolled through the portal (the author's term for the internet), seemingly at random, looking at various images and comments.

The following version of this book was used to create this study guide: Lockwood, Patricia.
