Chapter 1 avers that Skim’s visual conventions are non-prose, textual interventions into social heteronormativity and race. The narrative’s strategically engineered visual interruptions demand that the reader stop at key textual moments, moments outside of diegetic time, to appreciate homosexual encounters or subtle forms of racial discrimination that are present in the illustrations but absent in the novel’s prose. Images “speak” more loudly than prose, driving a narrative in which homosexual encounters become fantastic, meaning both potentially fictional and irrepressible, and race emerges as Skim’s salient, but textually silent, difference in stark contrast to her blonde-haired, blue-eyed peers.