Chapter 20: 2020 — How a Chaotic Year Brought Perfect Vision

⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This guide contains detailed spoilers for the entire novel. Proceed only if you've finished reading or are comfortable knowing the plot.

Summary

The chapter opens with Brunson writing from her living-room couch, seven to eight months into the pandemic. She reflects on how the arrival of COVID-19 felt like a record scratch for the country—life was moving, then suddenly stopped.

Before lockdown, she had lunch with two close friends, Nadia and Kate, at a West Hollywood restaurant. She arrived armed with anxiety and research about virus transmission, having spent months glued to Twitter reading about the disease spreading overseas. Her friends dismissed her concerns: Nadia had a Bali trip planned and didn't think it was a big deal, while Kate said she'd heard it was just like the flu. Brunson insisted it was going to be very bad. This turned out to be her last restaurant catch-up with friends for a year.

A week before lockdown, she told her boyfriend she wanted to stock up on nonperishables. He looked at her like she was crazy but went along. When they returned to the store the following week, the shelves were bare, and people were panic-buying items like pool toys and kumquats. Armed with toilet paper, pasta, and their own supplies, they locked the door and settled onto the couch to scroll for news—and that's where they stayed for months.

Brunson found the isolation difficult. She describes herself as someone who moves, makes, and does, and without real-life connection, she grew tired from constant doomscrolling. She observed disappointing behavior across America: people refusing masks, claiming the virus was a hoax, and even showing up at state capitols with guns to demand haircuts. She also noticed a collective boredom expressed through bread-baking talk, which bothered her deeply given how much worse things were for people who were impoverished, housing insecure, or who had lost jobs. Still, she recognized that joking and disassociating were coping mechanisms—she made her own jokes about playing Mario Party to turn away from the pain of losing a friend and a family member to COVID.

Three months into shelter-in-place, Kate called to tell her about George Floyd's killing in Minneapolis. Brunson initially dismissed it as old news, but Kate insisted it had happened the day before. While checking out at Whole Foods, Brunson tapped the link Kate sent and watched the first seconds of the video—the cop's knee on a man's neck—before shutting it off. She grabbed her groceries and walked home upset, this time not calling anyone for company.

She told her boyfriend, who hadn't seen the news and was in a good mood. He didn't immediately grasp the gravity, and she insisted he look it up. They spent hours talking about how this was a huge problem and how everything in the nation needed to change. Their conversation was layered and complicated: What would the world look like for their possible child? Why had this been acceptable for so long? What would they no longer be silent about? The night was emotionally exhausting. Her boyfriend went for a long drive to process, and Brunson took her own space to think. She reflects that the night could easily have led to a breakup, but instead it made them stronger.

The following night, protests broke out in Minneapolis. Brunson watched livestreams of people taking over the streets. She notes that protests were nothing new—Ahmaud Arbery had been killed in Georgia less than two weeks earlier—but this felt different. For the first time in her lifetime, Black Lives Matter felt comfortable on almost everyone's tongue, with people of every race taking to the streets. She told her boyfriend she was going to protest; he said if she was going, he was going too.

They joined a protest at Pan Pacific Park in West Hollywood. The crowd was massive—around five thousand people of all races. The walk to the Grove was peaceful, with chanting, singing, and dancing. Brunson's anxiety about being around people for the first time in months subsided. Then the police arrived, decked out in shields and gas masks. A chant of