It's been a week since the novel's publication, and the narrator is still in a bad mood. He's got a scratched and swollen notebook, and he's not sure what's wrong with it. He tries to calm himself down by saying that he'll just use his laptop to do his work. He doesn't want anyone to mess with it, so he puts it on so they won't get in trouble. He tells his dog to "plop cold" and "tick tock tick" , and then he starts using his mouse to do some work. The dog starts whimpering, which makes the narrator realize that she's overreacting. The narrator tells us that the only family she has is her curt father, who announces his remarriage one day without consulting her. This makes her even more upset, because her relationship with her father is "worse than strangers" . She says that her stepmother leaves the twins with her every day, and that her father pays more attention to the remarriage than to what the new family is saying. The only thing that makes her feel better about this is that the twins keep coming to her to play with her, even though she is in pain. She tells her dog to rub her with the palm of his hand, and she'll try to work on this with her dog. She's still not sure how to do it, but she promises to try. She asks her dog if he'd like to get some sleep, and when he says yes, she asks him if he wants to do something "fun" with her. He says no, and they're going to do "something fun" together. He asks her why she gave him the balloons, and her dog says that she hated