Everything I Never Told You: Chapter 1 Summary & Analysis

Lydia is dead, but her family does not yet know this. It is May 3, 1977 and, at 6:30 am, Lydia has not shown up for breakfast. Lydia’s mother Marilyn has marked Lydia’s physics homework and placed it next to her bowl of cereal; Marilyn’s husband James is already on the way to work. At home, Lydia’s brother Nath yawns, and Lydia’s sister Hannah remarks that Lydia is slow to come downstairs. Marilyn goes up to look in Lydia’s room, and finds everything in its place but no sign of Lydia. Marilyn blinks, hoping Lydia will suddenly appear, but she does not. Back downstairs, Nath remarks that he heard Lydia’s radio playing at 11:30 the night before, and Hannah asks if it’s possible to get kidnapped at 16. When Marilyn reenters the kitchen, for a moment Nath thinks it is Lydia, even though Lydia’s hair is black and Marilyn’s is blond. “Defying genetics,” however, Lydia has blue eyes, which is part of the reason why she is both of her parents’ favorite child.

The family sees that the car is still in the driveway, though this doesn’t tell them much, as last week Lydia failed her driver’s test. It is now 7:30 in the morning and Hannah asks if they should still go to school. Marilyn instructs Nath to drive them there, and she assures her children that she will figure out what’s happened to Lydia. After Nath and Hannah have left, Marilyn thinks of a time when Lydia was a baby and she burned her hand on the stove while Marilyn had her back turned. Marilyn remembers looking at Lydia and thinking, “What else have you been hiding?” She did not realize that her daughter could walk, and it shocked her that Lydia already had “secrets.”

Marilyn calls the secretary at Lydia’s high school to ask if Lydia is there. Though she is tenth grade, Lydia’s first course of the day is an eleventh-grade physics class. While Marilyn waits, she thinks of a little girl who went missing a few years ago and was found suffocated inside a storage shed. After this happened, local parents were advised to check tight spaces and call the police immediately if they discovered their children were missing. The school secretary tells Marilyn that Lydia is not in class. Marilyn hangs up without replying.

Marilyn searches the house and thinks of a girl from her school who, when she was 12, disappeared and was found raped and strangled by the side of the road. Her mind jumps to famous murder cases that are currently dominating the media. Marilyn tries to reassure herself that “things like that don’t happen here,” “here” meaning the small college town of Middlewood, Ohio. Only 3,000 people live in Middlewood, and Marilyn thinks that even Middlewood Lake is “really just a glorified pond.” The narrator corrects her, emphasizing that the lake is both large and deep. Marilyn keeps looking through the house but finds nothing, and she dials James’ phone number.

So far, James’ day is still normal; he is sitting at his desk marking a student’s poorly-written essay for an introductory course. As each summer approaches, students begin to make less effort, and James feels frustrated. He’s 46 and tenured, but he is still sometimes not recognized as a member of faculty. Still, he finds some pleasure in surprising people with the fact that he’s a professor of American history. Louisa Chen, one of James’ graduate teaching assistants, enters and tells him that the papers she has just graded were also of poor quality. From the back, she looks like Lydia, although Louisa’s eyes are brown, not blue. She is the first Asian student that James has ever taught, which excited him when he first met her. However, when Louisa saw a photo of James’ family on his desk, she commented on the fact that Marilyn was not Chinese. James was disappointed—everyone else pointed this out, but he thought Louisa would be different.

Louisa remarks that the undergraduates in the course they are teaching don’t know much about geography, and James responds, “Well, this isn’t Harvard.” Louisa reassures him that he shouldn’t blame himself and that he is not wasting his life. James asks Louisa to stand still as he pulls a ladybug from her hair. At this moment, Stanley Hewitt enters and James, who hates him, bristles. Stan says he hopes he “isn’t interrupting anything,” and Louisa exits, blushing. James feels a violent surge of anger at Stan, which he lets out by crushing the ladybug. The narrator remarks that this is the last second of “ignorant calm” before much greater problems arise. At that moment, Marilyn calls and asks James to come home.

The police tell James and Nath that lots of teenagers run away from home, and that often teenage girls are angry with their parents without their parents realizing. Nath watches one of the officers touch Lydia’s “Baby Soft” perfume “as if cupping a child’s head.” The officers advise them that most teenage girls come home of their own accord within 24 hours. Suddenly, Officer Fiske remembers that Marilyn went missing 11 years ago and asks James to confirm if this is correct. James, embarrassed, replies that this was only a “miscommunication” and a “family matter.”

Downstairs, Hannah shows the policeman a photo from the past Christmas. Lydia was in a bad mood and Nath tried to cheer her up, but it didn’t work, and Lydia is scowling in the picture. James tells the officers to use a different photo, so people don’t think Lydia “looks like that all the time.” James chooses a photo of Lydia from her 16th birthday; she is wearing lipstick and “looks like a model… having an improbably good time.” James says they will make a flyer if she doesn’t return by tomorrow, and that he is sure everything will be fine. Marilyn insists that Lydia would not have run away of her own accord, and asks worriedly if there’s “some psycho kidnapping girls.” Officer Fiske reassures her that this is highly unlikely and that in almost every case girls come home by themselves.

The police leave, after instructing James and Marilyn to write a list of Lydia’s friends who might be able to help them discover where she is. Nath says nothing, but he knows these girls are not Lydia’s friends. They sometimes spend hours with Lydia on the phone, but Nath knows this is only because they want Lydia’s help with their homework. The only person Lydia has actually been spending time with is Jack Wolff, a boy who lives with his mother, Janet, on the same street as the Lees. Jack and Lydia drive around in his car while Lydia pretends to be at school. When Marilyn disappeared years before, Jack “humiliated” Nath; after Marilyn’s return, Janet is still divorced and Jack continues to “run wild.” Nath says nothing of Jack and Lydia’s friendship because he doesn’t want to admit that it is real.

James calls each of the friends on the list, but none of them have any idea where Lydia might be. Hannah sits under the table and touches Nath’s toe with her own, but he doesn’t react. James finishes calling the last friend, Karen Adler. Lydia talks about Karen all the time, and James used to hear her gossiping on the phone to Karen and her other friends. However, he is now becoming increasingly doubtful that Lydia’s claims of spending time with these girls are true. James calls Officer Fiske and tells him that no-one Lydia “knows from school” has any idea where she is; Fiske tells him they will send an officer to look for Lydia. Dinnertime comes, but the family doesn’t eat anything. James tries to stay cheerful, but is unconvincing.

Nath looks out his bedroom window at Jack’s house and plans to sneak out to find him. He thinks back on the night before, the last time saw Lydia. He’d just come back from a four-day campus visit to Harvard, where he’d been thrilled by his first taste of college life. On returning home, he’d asked Lydia how the past few days had been and she’d barely replied. Meanwhile, Hannah is reading The Sound and the Fury, which she’d stolen from Lydia a few weeks before. The book is annotated with Lydia’s notes from class, but only up until a certain point. The night before, Hannah had been lying in bed when she was awoken by a “soft thud” at 2am. She’d seen a slim figure walking across the front lawn and realized it was Lydia. Hannah imagined what life would be like if her sister left, how her parents favoritism of Lydia might transfer to Hannah. She thinks of her family’s distress at Lydia’s disappearance and how angry they would be if they knew Hannah didn’t stop her from leaving—but as Hannah had watched, she didn’t know where Lydia was going, or even really believe that she was leaving at all.

On Wednesday morning, James calls Officer Fiske again, but there is no news. Hannah and Nath stay home from school, but the family finds it difficult to do anything—watch TV, read, or even vacuum. That afternoon, a passerby notices that the rowboat used by the community is sitting in the middle of the lake. At night, the police call to ask if Lydia has ever “played with” the boat. James responds decisively that she hasn’t; while James and Nath are both enthusiastic swimmers, Lydia refused to take lessons and has never gone more than ankle-deep in the lake. When James tells the police that Lydia can’t swim, the meaning of his words give him a chill. The next day, the police find Lydia’s body in the water.