Chapter 1 opens with one of the titular characters, Boy, describing her youth, beginning with her fascination with mirrors, which she “believed […] to be trustworthy” (3), and in which she would pretend to be other people, but also examine herself for her own emotions and moods. She was an apathetic but intelligent student who was more concerned with the reaction of the boys in school; most boys were uninterested in her, but the ones who were “tended to lose [their] balance” and send her “tormented” love notes (4). Her sense of character, she claims, developed in the mirrors without her interference (5).

Boy is born on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the 1930s. Her father is a rat-catcher and an old-fashioned man; her mother is absent and never discussed. Her father’s method of rat control is to starve rats in the basement of their building, blind them, then let them loose at the job site, where they frantically destroy all the other rats. He is also abusive, both to Boy and to his own girlfriend, who leaves when Boy is fifteen.

Boy believes that people can “smile and still be villains” (6). She also believes that character is, in part, defined by whether or not one can kill in order to solve a problem, which is the “kind of bottom line [that] is either in your character or it isn’t, and […] it develops early” (7).