Bucky Duvalle and his friends sexually assaulted and attempted to rape Patrice in a car the summer before the events of the novel take place. It could have been even worse, Patrice thinks, but she managed to escape and then swim to her uncle, Thomas’s, boat in the middle of the lake. After the assault, Bucky is struck by an illness that contorts his mouth and then travels down his side. Patrice feels that she did it to him—that her anger left her body and struck the side of Bucky’s face. Bucky, however, thinks that Zhaanat, Patrice’s mother, put a curse on him. When he asks her to lift the curse, though, she tells him that what happened is a result of his own actions and that he did it to himself.