Ingrid’s thoughts on having her braces adjusted: “Adjustment meant tightening. Tightening didn’t hurt much while it was happening, but every turn of the screw made a squeaky sound that seemed to come from right inside Ingrid’s head, and reminded her of the Shackleton IMAX movie she’d seen a few weeks before on a class trip –that scene where ice floes slowly crush the ship to death.”
Ingrid’s conversation with the foreign taxi driver: “’You are pressing for time?’ he said… ‘What time is it?’ Ingrid said. The driver snapped open his cell phone. ‘Five on top of the button,’ he said.”
Ingrid’s musings about algebra: “X. All those math people had a big—what was the word? Mom used it all the time –fetish. That was it. Fetish…They made a fetish about x, couldn’t keep their hands off it.”
Ingrid’s thought about old people: “Old people didn’t seem to laugh often, but when they did, they loved it, kind of surprising themselves by how much…”
Ingrid’s description of her complexion: “…not just a regular zit, but a zit with a blackhead in the middle –a one-in-a-million dermatological freak show, maybe the basis for some researcher’s prize-winning paper.”
