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15. First Contact, Part Three
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Everything, Everything, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Coming of Age
Trust and Lies
Family, Abuse, and Bravery
The Value of Experience
Summary
Analysis
Maddy is putting her finishing touches on her model for architecture class. She designed an outdoor shopping/dining center in her favorite style, which is art deco. Carla calls that Mr. Waterman, Maddy’s tutor, is here. This is only the third time Maddy has met him, and Maddy suspects that Mom let him come this time because she still feels bad about turning Kara and Olly away. It’s a pain to come see Maddy, since visitors have to undergo a physical exam and be decontaminated for an hour.
Designing this shopping center is another way for Maddy to experience the outside world from the comfort and safety of her own home. However, it’s worth considering that because Maddy has never been in a shopping center like this, her design probably has a number of issues that simply aren’t visible to her—another consequence of never experiencing the outside world.
Themes
Mr. Waterman bustles in and happily greets Maddy. He never looks at Maddy with pity and loves architecture, which makes Maddy love him. She thinks that she’d be an architect if she were going to be anything when she grows up. Mr. Waterman inspects her model and praises her handiwork. He looks for her astronaut, which she hides in every model she makes. The astronaut is sitting in a diner surrounded by food, and Mr. Waterman asks how the astronaut will eat any of it through his helmet. Maddy hadn’t considered that the astronaut would eat anything.
The astronaut is a symbol for Maddy and how she moves through the world. Like the astronaut, Maddy doesn’t consider that she might ever be able to eat food from the outside or experience the world through anything but her sanitized home or through her books. Mr. Waterman’s comment suggests that this kind of oversight is something that comes with Maddy’s illness and means that she’ll have a far more difficult time than others being an architect as an adult.
Themes
