What to Say Next

“I’m terrible with names. Partly this is because names are random words completely devoid of context, and partly because this is because I believe names rarely fit the people they belong to, which, if you think about it, makes perfect sense. Parents name their child at a time when they have the absolute least amount of information they will ever have about the person they are naming.”

David’s commentary on how he thinks about names both offers information about why he keeps his notebook (to help him connect events to people’s names) and the way he processes the world. His questioning of something that many people take for granted (conventions of naming babies at birth) shows the reader how neurodiversity affects his thinking, which is clinical instead of emotional. His aside of “if you think about it” suggests his awareness that most people do not think about it.

“I feel stupid. Could that be what grief does to you? It’s like I’m walking around school with an astronaut’s helmet on my head.”

Here, Kit describes one of the ways that grief manifests for her in the novel. Throughout the text, she struggles with this “astronaut helmet” feeling, which she finds isolating until she speaks to David. Her sense that David understands her better than her friends implies that the “astronaut helmet” metaphor also applies, in the text, to neurodiversity, though David does not adopt the metaphor himself.

“Don’t get me wrong: I feel awkward and uncomfortable most of the time, but I’ve learned how to fake it. David, on the other hand, seems to have completely opted out of even trying to act like everyone else.”

Through the internal monologue of Kit, the novel clarifies its representation of the ways that neurodiversity and neurotypicality are different. Instead of suggesting that feeling “awkward and uncomfortable” is exclusive to neurodivergent people, it implies that feeling such a way is universal, at least in adolescence.