On a Fourth of July when Zelu was twelve, she and her friends played a violent tag game called the "Hunger Games," with her mother's brownies as the prize. Confident in her upper-body strength, Zelu shoved her friend Sarah down and climbed high into the big tree in their backyard to evade the boys chasing her. Perched smugly above them, dreaming of becoming a NASA astronaut, she heard a cracking sound and fell through the branches.

The fall left Zelu paraplegic. She spent weeks in the hospital, realizing through recurring dreams that she would never walk again and that her astronaut dreams were over. Her older sister Chinyere, traumatized by the incident, coped by cooking constantly, sending Zelu daily plates of Nigerian and other dishes that sustained her emotionally. Friends Sarah, Jamal, Chiedu, and Mike visited often, turning her hospital room into a social hub.

Zelu befriended Tyrone, a sixteen-year-old drug dealer recovering from shattering his legs in a jump from a fourth-story window. Drawn in by Chinyere's cooking, Tyrone became part of her circle. During one visit, he raged about looking like a "rusted-out robot," then apologized; Zelu told him anger wouldn't change anything and resolved to move "onward." Tyrone refused to let his outside friends meet her, explaining the hospital was a separate world where he wasn't his street self, "T." He left before she did, leaving a notebook and pen inscribed "Onward. Sincerely, T."

Zelu adjusted, got a customized aqua wheelchair, and the day before discharge had her first panic attack in a courtyard when wind in a tree triggered a flashback to the cracking branches. She recovered alone and went home. There, she discovered her parents had cut down the tree—not to spare her feelings, but because gardeners found it had been killed by emerald ash borer beetles, already dead, which was why the branch could not hold her weight.