“I knew what I was in for eventually. I was just marking time. Whatever I did was just marking time. If people were willing to pay me to go to school and mark time, why not do it?”

Here, Lynn reflects on her motivation and what drives her to work hard and get good grades despite her condition. She feels that she doesn’t have any good options but to waste time distracting herself from her inevitable decline. Lynn is trapped in her own condition and, at this point in the story, feels cynical and hopeless about her future.

“Non-DGDs say something about our disease makes us good at the sciences—genetics, molecular biology, biochemistry…That something was terror. Terror and a kind of driving hopelessness.”

Lynn provides a glimpse of the stereotypes she has to confront as a DGD. This is an instance of a rare positive stereotype of DGDs that we eventually learn does seem to have some basis in fact. This quote further elaborates that she and other DGDs work hard to cope with stereotypes and bias. Until Lynn meets Beatrice and discusses the patients at Dilg, comments by non-DGDs about the intensity of DGD interests feel like just another way to reduce the personalities of DGDs to something foreign and inhuman. Even well-intentioned comments by non-DGDs are likely rooted in bias because they likely do not have the information Beatrice has at Dilg.