Whit has been on the move since we first encountered him in that little church in Claremore, OK. His parents’ stormy marriage has ended, leaving him and and his sister Libby to find their way with their father, Cole Allen, in Wyoming. Whit’s world changes forever when the secretary at his elementary school notices his poor vision. Armed with a new set of lenses, he sets out to make sense of a world fraught with trouble—especially when you are the tallest, smartest, and most awkwardly bespectacled kid in class.

Cole Allen, meanwhile, finds his home in religious zealotry. After several failed romances with Whit’s elementary school teachers, he throws his energies into preaching at the state penitentiary, where Bonner Hanson becomes his star pupil and best friend. Whit tries to fit in with the older men, but he suspects that whatever apparatus enables belief is somehow faulty within him. Cole Allen harbors similar suspicions about both his children, although he’s burning too hot for the Lord to pay them much attention.

Before Whit can graduate high school, chaos descends on the family again. Fed up with Libby’s defiance, Cole Allen sends her to Montana to live with his estranged mother. Bonner has an inappropriate relationship with Tamara, one of the girls in Whit’s youth group. Cole Allen defends his friend, and the two of them turn their attention to sabotaging Gray Butte Mine, which is about to close and render much of the town unemployed. Whit gets caught in the middle between Tamara’s angry father and his own, but does not yet have the maturity to know what to do about it. The Whitman men leave town with the issue unresolved.

After bouncing around from state to state for several months, Whit finally graduates high school and enters Covenant University, the holiest of higher-ed holy rollers. He becomes friends with Isaias, a young filmmaker out to subvert Covenant’s repressive culture by filming real stories from fellow undergrads. While the two young men are on a weekend visit to see Whit’s family—his mother and sister have moved to Kentucky, along with their new stepfather Byron—someone rats out their project to university administration, landing them in trouble with no easy escape.

And so we come to Part II, where Whit’s real education as an adult begins.