Adam's girlfriend Amber dives off their boat at Clinton Lake and swims to shore, abandoning him mid-conversation.

Adam and his debate partner Joanna win a local tournament by using the spread to overwhelm their opponents with rapid-fire arguments.

Jonathan and Jane meet in graduate school, where Jonathan studies speech shadowing, and the couple later settle in Topeka.

Jane recalls a repressed memory of being sexually assaulted by her father, recovered through informal therapy sessions with Sima.

Jane publishes a bestselling self-help book and begins receiving violent, threatening phone calls from anonymous men she calls the Men.

Darren gets drunk with high school classmates at Clinton Lake and passes out while the other teens chant his name.

Jonathan and Sima kiss and have sex in her hotel room during the families' joint trip to New York.

Sima acts cold and distant while interviewing Jane at a New York book event, fracturing their close friendship.

Westboro Baptist Church members picket Jane's keynote speech, and Adam shouts a misogynistic slur at one of the protestors.

Jonathan confesses his affair with Sima to Jane during a heated argument at Adam's national debate championship.

Adam wins the extemporaneous speaking championship at Minneapolis' Mall of America, completing his senior year debate career.

Darren throws a billiard cue ball at a girl named Mandy Owen's face at a party, permanently damaging her jaw and speech.

Adam visits his now-senile, mute grandfather in a nursing home, uncertain whether his grandfather can even hear him.

Adult Adam argues with a dismissive father on a New York playground and knocks the man's phone out of his hands.

Protesters outside the ICE federal building use the people's mic to amplify a speech, and Adam forces himself to join in.

Pool 1 traces the main narrative arc of The Topeka School through its most pivotal events. Adam's senior year in Topeka frames the story, from his early romantic entanglements to his triumph at the national debate championship. Meanwhile, Jane's book success brings both fame and misogynistic threats from anonymous men, straining her marriage to Jonathan and her friendship with Sima. Jonathan's affair with Sima eventually explodes into the open when he confesses to Jane during the championship trip. Darren's storyline reaches its dark conclusion when he attacks Mandy Owen at a party, permanently altering her ability to speak. The novel closes with adult Adam in New York, grappling with fatherhood and politics, and joining a protest that ends with the healing practice of the people's mic.

The core story of the Gordon family and Darren's violence.

Darren sits in a police examination room and recounts throwing the cue ball to two officers who ask him to start at the beginning.

Adam accidentally enters a stranger's house after dark, mistaking it for Amber's home because of the neighborhood's identical layouts.

Adam visits therapist Dr. Erwood, who leads Adam to the Copper Wall electrode and leaves him alone in the dark with it.

Jonathan establishes a film and video department at the Foundation and uses filmmaking to bond with withdrawn, privileged teenage boys.

Jonathan screens a film at the Foundation based on the Hesse Ziegler story, with Jonathan himself playing the role of Ziegler.

Darren's father dies in a car crash, and Darren believes his own harmful thoughts caused his father's death.

Jonathan arranges for Darren to work at the Surplus grocery store, where Darren's boss Stan delivers racist and misogynistic rants.

Jane's mother confesses to stealing a painting as the worst thing she ever did, inadvertently triggering Jane's memories of her assault.

Anonymous men confront Jane with insults in public while Adam is present, causing Adam to grow fearful and act out.

Darren wakes up alone in the woods the morning after his classmates abandon him by the lake following a night of drinking.

Darren walks for hours trying to find Topeka but realizes he has ended up in Lawrence, equally far from home.

A brawl erupts between boys from rival schools at a party after a drunk Darren stumbles into an athlete named Reynolds.

Jane gives Adam half an anti-anxiety pill before his extemp finals without consulting Jonathan, sparking a serious fight between the couple.

Adam and Amber have sex in Sima and Eric's bed at Jason's house party on the same night Darren attacks Mandy.

Adult Adam returns to Topeka for a poetry reading at Washburn University and spots Darren in the audience wearing a red MAGA cap.

Pool 2 captures the secondary events and background moments that give texture to the novel's world. Darren's story begins in a police interrogation room and moves through his father's death, his job at the Surplus grocery store, and his disorienting night lost in the Kansas countryside. Jane's trauma is deepened by her mother's inadvertent confession about a stolen painting, while Adam's childhood anxieties are heightened by witnessing men publicly harass his famous mother. Jonathan's efforts to help Darren through employment and therapy illuminate their complex relationship, while his creation of a film department at the Foundation reveals his unconventional approach to treating troubled teenage boys. The pool concludes in the novel's present day, with adult Adam returning to Topeka and recognizing a now-radicalized Darren at a poetry reading.

The supporting events that shape each character's world.

As children, Adam gives Darren a plant he claims has special powers, and Darren wishes for a tornado that arrives later that day.

Jonathan begins an affair with fellow graduate student Jane while still married to his first wife Rachel.

Jonathan and Jane take acid before visiting the Metropolitan Museum, where Jonathan hallucinates marble statues staring at him with contempt.

Darren describes to Jonathan his delusions about harmful thoughts and objects from his dreams appearing in bushes at Westboro Park.

Sima notices that Jane is reluctant to leave her own father alone with young Adam during a family visit.

Adam wakes his parents in the middle of the night to show them he has covered his penis entirely with chewing gum.

Adam's deeply conservative debate coach Peter Evanson trains Adam in extemporaneous speaking through regular sessions where they argue opposing political positions.

As a teenager living in Taipei, Jonathan loses his virginity at a brothel while imagining his best friend's sister instead.

Jonathan grows deeply attracted to Sima over months of intimate conversations before the two families travel together to New York.

Natalia breaks up with Adam over email after falling for a Spanish man during her semester abroad in Barcelona.

Jonathan flies to New York to bring a distraught Adam home after Natalia's email breakup leaves Adam unable to function.

As a child at a school skating party, Darren dances during the Snowball activity after a girl actively chooses him as her partner.

Adam enters his parents' bedroom during a late-night fight, then retreats to type poems and attempt to view pornography on his mother's computer.

Adult Adam drives through Topeka feeling unsettled and deliberately avoids the street where Jason's house party took place years earlier.

A cop orders Adam to tell his daughter to stop drawing chalk on the sidewalk outside the ICE offices during the protest.

Pool 3 focuses on the key revelations, formative decisions, and emotional turning points that quietly reshape the characters' lives. Jonathan's pattern of infidelity begins with his affair with Jane during graduate school, establishing a cycle he will later repeat with Sima, while his adolescent experiences in Taipei reveal the guilt and complicity he carries into adulthood. Darren's magical thinking and his sessions with Jonathan as his therapist expose the psychological forces driving his isolation and eventual violence. Jane's path to recovering her assault memory hinges on a seemingly small moment of observation by Sima, and Adam's childhood anxiety about masculinity surfaces in a strange late-night act involving chewing gum. The pool traces each character through private crossroads before arriving at the novel's final image of a father and daughter confronted by state authority on a New York sidewalk.