The Miscalculations of Lightning Girl

Lucy dislikes dogs. She thinks they’re dirty and aggressive, yet, despite her fear of canines, she volunteers at a dog shelter to help with its paperwork. In the process, Lucy learns that dogs can be warmly affectionate, loyal, and endlessly loving, traits she hasn’t yet discovered in herself or at school. Simply by petting the mutt Cutie Pi, Lucy feels a simple, unadorned love for another creature. Dogs therefore symbolize her introduction to devotion. Through the ailing Cutie Pi, whose plight inspires Windy and Levi to help Lucy during her darkest hours, she learns that human friends can be loving and devoted as well.

Lucy’s seventh grade experience happens at East Hamlin Middle School in her town in North Carolina. She wants to stay home and avoid people, but her grandmother believes the precocious child needs to learn how to do her studies in a social setting before she tries it at college. Middle school initially symbolizes a personal hell for Lucy, but she finds new friends and new challenges there. East Hamlin is the main setting for her social trial by fire, and it tests her to the fullest. Her acceptance of life at middle school symbolizes her growing acceptance of herself.

The North Carolina Academy of Science, Math, and Engineering (NCASME) is a state-run boarding school for 11th and 12th graders who excel in math and science. Based on a real school (the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, or NCSSM), the Academy wants Lucy to attend—though enrolled in seventh grade, she’s already finished her GED—and it would be a great place for her to study advanced math while with students somewhat closer to her own age. For Nana, the Academy is a place for Lucy to aspire to, though Lucy has mixed feelings because, at East Hamlin Middle School, she’s finally made some friends. The Academy thus symbolizes the powerful pull of math on Lucy’s life in contrast to the equally powerful tug of friendship.

Lucy’s encounter with a lightning bolt alters her brain and leaves her with a spectacular ability in math and a set of anxious behaviors called obsessive-compulsive disorder, or OCD. People with OCD resolve intense anxieties with ritualized behaviors that calm them. Thus, many with OCD engage in excessive handwashing; others count the things they observe, check and double-check door locks, perform touching or stepping rituals before entering buildings, and so on.

Lucy, who suffers anxiety about other people and germs, taps her foot three times to calm herself; she also must sit down three times in a row, clean all surfaces she must touch, and sometimes recite the digits of pi to relax her nerves. Her OCD is the public face of her remodeled brain; its social awkwardness is all she dares to show the world, so she hides her math genius, lest others overdose on her strangeness. OCD is a driving issue and motif in the plot that keeps her separate from other people, and that she must somehow transcend to make friends.