Yoon uses colors symbolically throughout the book. At the story’s beginning, Madeline is associated strongly with the color white: She has white cake and frosting for her birthday, she eats white bean soup with white napkins, and she exclusively wears white t-shirts and white Keds. Madeline becomes less associated with white as the story progresses because it symbolizes Pauline’s control over her: “I know she’s not upset that I bought new clothes. She’s upset that I didn’t ask her opinion and bought them in colors that she didn’t expect. She’s upset with the change she didn’t see coming” (114). Madeline eventually buys colorful clothes and paints her bedroom many colors, rejecting the sterility imposed by her mother. Moreover, Olly dresses almost all in black, symbolizing both his difference from Madeline and his status as someone outside the family’s hierarchy. When he and Madeline reunite at the end of the book, he wears a gray t-shirt, symbolizing that he too has experienced change and transformation.

The body is a symbol of physical security and a deeper involvement in the world. At the beginning of the story, Madeline places faux food in front of an astronaut figurine in her architecture model, and her tutor bemusedly asks how the figurine will “eat” the food with its helmet on. Madeline says, “It’d never occurred to me that he’d want to eat the food” (59). This demonstrates that she still cannot imagine full involvement and freedom in the world. She also has a troubled relationship with her body because she views it as the site of her supposed “sickness” and therefore as inadequate.

When Madeline meets Olly, she’s struck by his ease in his body and his physical way of interacting with the world: “It’s such a graceful and effortless movement that I’m momentarily filled with envy. What’s it like to have such complete confidence in your body and what it will do?” (76). Later, she muses, “Again I’m struck by how peaceful he is in motion. This is like meditation for him. His body is his escape from the world, whereas I’m trapped in mine” (118). Olly’s way of being, combined with his physical attraction to Madeline, help develop Madeline’s awareness of her bodied self: “All at once I’m hyperaware of his body and mine…Something in his tone makes me blush hard, and heat travels a slow wave across my face and chest” (77).

This heightened awareness continues as their relationship develops: “What is it about being in the same room with him that makes me so conscious of my body and all its parts? He even makes me aware of my skin” (95). The two come to communicate through body language: “Our bodies are having their own conversation separate and apart from us. Is this the difference between friendship and something else? This awareness that I have of him?” (96). In other words, Olly reveals a different plane of being from the relatively disembodied, intellectual approach to life that Madeline has adopted by necessity, and she finds herself able to respond on a physical level after spending some time with him: “He’s infectious and I’m laughing, too, my whole body responding to him” (98). By the time the book ends, Madeline’s relationship with her body has been transformed by her experiences with Olly, most notably evidenced by her ability to connect with and convey love to him through her sexuality.