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19. Later Still
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
Two days later, Carla sternly tells Maddy that she can’t touch Olly. Maddy asks if Olly is really already here and decontaminated, and Carla replies that he’s in the sunroom. Maddy fidgets and Carla tells Maddy to fix herself up. Maddy asks why Carla changed her mind. When Carla says that Maddy deserves something, Maddy realizes that this is how Rosa gets what she wants. Maddy rushes to the mirror. She likes to think that she looks like an equal split of Mom and Maddy’s dad, with warm brown skin and big wavy hair. She experiments with smiling and asks Carla if she’s sure this will be okay. Carla says that everything, including doing nothing, is a risk. Maddy studies her familiar white room and thinks that Olly is the exact opposite of this space—and a huge risk.
Carla again seems to recognize that Maddy is at a place in her development where she’s increasingly curious about experiencing everything the world has to offer—and that having a crush on a boy isn’t abnormal or bad at all. When Maddy situates Olly as being the exact opposite of her white room, it suggests that she’s starting to see that her identity is entangled in the house itself, and that she sees herself as similarly alienated from the outside world. Anything that’s not already in the house is a threat to this old identity.
Themes
