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28. Mirror, Mirror
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 finds Olly on the wall again and sits on the couch. He comments on her choice to wear shoes and when Maddy says she has nine pairs of the same shoes, he insists she has no right to complain about his clothing choices. The air filters come on and when Olly asks, Maddy explains how it works and says that the settlement paid for it. She quickly adds that a trucker killed Maddy’s dad and brother in a car accident, and settled with Mom. Maddy says she doesn’t remember them and struggles with how to miss them. Olly asks if Maddy ever wonders what things would be like if she could change one thing, something Maddy has been thinking a lot about recently.
Learning Maddy’s family history shows that Maddy’s present is one informed by family trauma in the past. Both Maddy and Mom must live with the ghosts of Maddy’s dad and brother, as the safety precautions in the house are a constant reminder that loss could easily happen again due to Maddy’s fragile health. That Olly’s closet is similarly limited to Maddy’s suggests that, like her, he’s extremely caught up in his current situation and doesn’t have the time or energy to experiment with who he might be outside of this situation.
Themes
Olly suggests that people aren’t really unique; instead, they’re made up of outputs and inputs, like a formula. He says that he thinks that if he can pin down one or two important inputs, he can figure a person out. Maddy asks how he’ll figure out which input to change. Olly says that it’d be easy to make things worse, but he suggests that if he could figure it out, he could fix things before they got messed up. He seems frustrated and embarrassed and says that chaos theory states that it’s impossible to do this. Maddy says she already knew that—she learned that people are unpredictable from books. They laugh and Maddy focuses on Olly’s dimple, which she’s not supposed to do. She knows she’s going to fall in love with him.
That Olly spends so much time thinking about how he could change things suggests that he also lives with possible regrets and trauma in his past. His desire to change the past, however, suggests that he’s ignoring the person he might become in the future by learning simply to deal with what happened to him. When both Olly and Maddy can come to similar conclusions about unpredictability from books and math, it shows that they can both come up with effective ways of coping with life in a theoretical way when their literal realities are too complex to make sense of.
Themes
