Kiana Roubini’s stepmother, whom she’s nicknamed Stepmonster, drops Kiana off at Greenwich Middle School for Kiana’s first day of school. Stepmonster promises to come back and help Kiana register after cleaning baby puke out of the car. The school day starts before Stepmonster returns, but Kiana doesn’t care. She’s a short-timer at Greenwich, only there for a few months while her mom shoots a movie, and “short-timers don’t stress over things like that” (3).

After a student driving a pickup truck nearly runs her over, Kiana heads inside to the main office. There, a frazzled secretary plucks a schedule out of Kiana’s open backpack and tells Kiana’s to go to room 117. The schedule actually belongs to Parker Elias (the guy who almost ran her over), but Kiana doesn’t want to face the secretary again and doesn’t care what class she ends up in. After getting lost, Kiana finally finds room 117 and opens the door to find kids “toasting marshmallows skewered on the end of number two pencils” (11). The class is the Self-Contained Special Eighth-Grade Class, known as the Unteachables.