Notes

In a future America, seventeen-year-old Jenna Fox awakes from a year-long coma with no memory of her family or her past. She remembers the darkness of her coma, but not the terrible accident that caused it. Her mother encourages her to watch home movies to jog her memory. Her father, a rich doctor and head of a medical research corporation, is usually away on business. Lily, Jenna’s grandmother, is strangely cold towards Jenna. Jenna attempts to reconstruct her world by reading the dictionary and watching the many home videos taken of her childhood. Against Mother’s instructions, she eventually ventures outside the house and meets her neighbor, an artist named Mr. Bender. On her walk back home, she falls into a shallow creek, and recalls her first memory from her past: nearly drowning as a young toddler.

Lily takes Jenna to the local Catholic mission, where Jenna sees a boy her age with black hair. That night, Jenna asks to be allowed to go back to school. Mother refuses, but at Lily’s insistence, eventually relents, allowing Jenna to register for a small, local school. On her way to visit Mr. Bender again, Jenna meets a strangely hypnotic boy named Dane. When Jenna arrives for her first day at school, she discovers that both Dane and the black-haired boy from the mission, Ethan, are students there as well. Though she worries about fitting in, Ethan and another classmate, Allys, quickly take Jenna under their wing. Allys, an amputee with prosthetic arms and legs, quickly decides she likes Jenna. Ethan warns her to stay away from Dane, while Dane warns her to stay away from Ethan. Jenna is assigned to work on a volunteer project with Ethan, and finds herself growing attracted to him.