“Opening Day” introduces Sam Gordon, Laura Silver, and the fictional Edwards School. The first day of a new semester finds Sam hurriedly entering his classroom. He begins the class by introducing himself and the topic, joking that it’s “Life Skills 101” rather than “The World of Economics” (3). He begins the lesson asking when the world’s oil will be depleted. The students groan and attempt to calculate, except for Amy Hunt, who thinks instead. When Sam asks her what she’s doing, she says it must be a trick question. Sam praises her skepticism and tells the class that the world will never run out of oil. When the students balk, he offers a rhetorical situation: A room full of free pistachios. If a student were given a room full of free pistachios and could bring her friends but had to leave the shells in the room, eventually the cost of sorting through the shells would be too great to continue to find the few free nuts remaining.

The narration shifts to Laura, the new English literature teacher at the Edwards School. Laura is besieged with anxiety. She tells the class they will read Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, and to begin their investigation of the novel she offers a quote from William Wordsworth: “Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers” (8).