Book 0, chapter 11
“You’ll just have to give her love, Alix. Then she’ll want to do what you say.” . . . “If you can’t make a child obey you, you just have to make her want to. And I am quite good at that.”

Book 0, chapter 12
“I think the secret might be to act as if you expect proper behavior, and if she doesn’t deliver, act really surprised or disappointed. But go easy at first. She has to care what we think before that sort of thing will matter to her, and so we have to make ourselves important to her. The girl needs to feel at home, and feel like she can trust us and like we trust her.”

Within reason, Ivy has pretty much done whatever she wants for her whole life until she begins interacting with Nina. There she meets several people who assume their authority overrides hers: People who become very disturbed or confused when she acts like they’re not the boss of her.

Nina’s teacher:

Book 1, chapter 3
“You think you can just wander onto this property and visit with students?” . . . “I’ve got a feeling you’re not authorized to be here. You’d better go through the office for a visitor’s pass or get off this campus immediately.”

Ivy’s response to that sort of attitude is not pretty.

I was getting what I wanted whether she wanted to let me or not, and I hoped I was making that clear.

And Nina’s principal:

“Excuse me. Who exactly are you and what are you doing here?” . . . “Well, I’ll tell you who I am and what I’m doing.” . . . “I’m the principal of this school, and I am removing you from the premises.” . . . “If you ever come onto school grounds again, you’d better go through the office or I will see to it that you get in serious trouble.”

And Ivy’s response to that is to pretend to obey, then return to the campus as soon as the principal is out of sight. It’s a slightly irritated attitude of “okay, I’ll do whatever I need to do to make them quit bugging me. God they’re annoying.”

And then Nina’s father:

Book 1, chapter 7
“This girl is a stranger.” . . . “I’m lookin’ out for your best interest here, Nina! You wanna get kidnapped or somethin’?” . . . “Don’t you touch her without my permission.”

Ivy’s response:

It wouldn’t do to shout at him or do something violent; that would only prove I wasn’t fit to be friends with Nina. I was proud to be learning how to deal with authority around here. I stayed silent and crossed my arms, not meeting his eyes. I was being submissive but I didn’t have to like it.

It’s obvious that authority is still a very abstract concept to Ivy. The rules they impose on her are more like suggestions: If she wants to avoid their annoying attention or she wants them to give in to her wishes the easy way (without having to throw them out the window), she’ll just have to obey. With a big melodramatic sigh.

Now Officer Zachary gets a chance to try to control Ivy:

Book 1, chapter 15
“What if we told you you had no choice? What if we decided to keep you here until the authorities took over? How about that?”

Ivy explains the situation to him in very explicit words:

“You can try to do whatever you please.” . . . “Right now, I’m saying that if you pretend I’ve got rights, I’ll pretend I live inside your system. I’d like for you to release me on your own terms. But if you won’t, I’ll take my freedom, because if you refuse me my rights, I’ll refuse your laws. I can do that just as easily as I can ignore the law of gravity.” . . . “You don’t get it, do you? You must not, or you wouldn’t be getting in my way!” . . . “I’m not yours! I’m not staying here. You can’t control me.” . . . “Only I control me.”

Forcing others to face the fact that they will be up against her formidable energy—piloted by a hair-trigger temper—is how she deals with authority in her early life.

In Book 2, not much has changed, but she wants a lot more from those in authority, and listens to them more because of it. It is a difficult transition for her, but she manages to digest it. When she’s caught in a bad situation and gets in trouble with the administration, the assistant principal, Mrs. Rhodes, is flabbergasted by Ivy’s easy disobeying:

Book 2, chapter 24
“Young lady, I said to stay here. I won’t have you wandering off.”

Ivy’s response:

I turned back around and gave her a puzzled sort of glare, frustration bubbling in my chest. I wasn’t sure how to deal with this. I’d never really been in a situation where I had to act politely subordinate, everyone I’d met I treated like an equal or less. But the assistant principal’s voice told me that high school students were expected to listen to her, even though they were almost adults. She wasn’t used to being up against a superior either.

Ivy ends up saying “please” and functionally begging for permission to do what she wants to do. It’s definitely one of the weirder experiences of her life.

A different kind of authority enters Ivy’s life in Book 3. It’s Ruben, who’s the director of the play Imagination. He is also one of her closest friends and her roommate, and outside of the theater she knows him as a guy who generally caters to her and has a very light demeanor. His bossiness in the director’s chair bothers her, and makes her balk under his control:

Book 3, chapter 32
Ruben: “All right, great. Let’s do it again.”
Ivy: “If it’s so great why are we doing it again?”
Ruben: “Because I’m the director and I told you to.”
Ivy: “I’ve got a headache, I can’t work anymore.”
Ruben: “Ivy, what the hell are you doing?”
Ivy: “I’m resting.”
Ruben: “You’d better be finished resting within the next minute, Ivy. We’re not done rehearsing this scene yet.”
Ivy: “Well what if I don’t want to work any more tonight?”
Ruben: “Then that’s tough shit. You have to.”
Ivy: “Or you’ll what?”

He admits that he can’t make her, but announces that he’s “very disappointed” in her, and then he tells everyone in the theater that she’s in a funk and they’ll have to pretend for the moment. She gets very upset with herself for being a baby and agrees to work on the scene again, and they reconcile. She realizes by this point that no one can win a battle of wills with her, but that if she fights and wins then she’ll also have to deal with how it makes both of the participants feel.

In Book 4, she becomes re-acquainted with her parents, and to some degree she views them as authorities because she thinks she’s “supposed” to. This passage hints at her feelings on the subject:

Book 4, chapter 24
I was . . . sincerely afraid that they might try to exploit me somehow. I was afraid because I knew I wouldn’t be able to say no. This was my only chance at a blood family and it would really hurt me to let them down. What if they turned out to be something I didn’t want to be part of? I tried to calm myself, remembering that I was eighteen years old and therefore legally an adult. They couldn’t force me to participate in the family if they were doing something I didn’t approve of. I was really glad I wasn’t seventeen, or younger. Then again, I had to remember that I was much stronger than the law anyway.

Later, the authority figure of Nina’s father pops back up, trying to assert some control over his family when he feels that Ivy is invading it:

Book 4, chapter 26
“I make the rules around here. And I said you can’t have friends to our birthday parties! She shouldn’t be here!”

Ivy responds rather maturely, at least for her:

“We don’t have to like each other, but if Nina wants me here, I’m gonna do what she wants, and that’s it. I’ll sit here and not say another word if you just leave me alone. I’m not gonna do anything but eat my cake, is that okay with you?”

When Ivy offhandedly mentions that Carl hates her, he asks to speak to her outside, claiming the following:

“Let’s put it this way. I don’t want you goin’ around thinkin’ I hate you, that ain’t it, I just want you to get how I feel about it, as her father. Fact is, I don’t like you in my daughter’s business. You’re dangerous and you’re just plain strange.” . . . “My problem is just that I’m not havin’ a whole lotta choice about how Nina gets raised these days, and because of you there ain’t nothin’ I can do about it.”

Ivy manages to calm Carl down and even get on his good side by being honest and rather baldly emotional with him. They even exchange apologies for each other’s transgressions, and Ivy finds she feels a lot more like she “won” something than any fight she’s ever triumphed in. And the lesson she learns is that compromise is the best strategy of all in dealing with most authority figures.

However, this does not mean that Ivy lets herself be a pushover—au contraire! If she perceives that people seek to control her, she still has the capacity to let loose. When she first meets Nicholas, he attempts the usual response to being invaded, which involves trying to blow her away with his wind while shouting cheesy threatening words. Her response:

Book 4, chapter 32
I let loose with a wind twice as strong as his, blowing it straight into the cave. The wind stopped immediately.

And when Nicholas demands that she address him with a ridiculous respectful title, she rebels:

Book 4, chapter 33
“I’m not calling you master. Get used to it.”

He gets angry and throws wind at her again, to which she replies by tossing it back at him and lifting him into the air. She tells him she wants to talk to him as equals and that she’s out of there if he won’t listen.

He bent his head. When I saw that posture a part of me crowed, that’ll show him who’s boss, and another part of me was ashamed of how quickly I’d enforced my dominance. It couldn’t be helped, though. I was stronger and it was my right to act like it.

Ruben also makes a comment at one time that insinuates that he has control over Ivy. When she asks why his friend Jesse wasn’t frightened of her when he told him about her existence, Ruben admits that he had said he could control her.

Book 4, chapter 41
“You respect me, so if I tell you to do something you do it.”

Ivy’s response:

“Control this.” He was floating on his back before he could blink.

Moral of the story: Don’t tell Ivy you’re her boss.

Ivy puts herself into a position of authority when she assumes the reins as Handprints president. She finds that many of her members don’t exactly defer automatically to the “boss” either. Nicholas appoints himself an “elder” and acts as though no one is as wise as he; Ivy finds this behavior irritating, but when it flares up late in Book 5 and he eventually decides that his goals do not mesh with Ivy’s, she gets very angry with him.

Book 5, chapter 14
“It is true that homework pales in significance beside a human life.”

As for Bailey, she has never actually been all that excited about being in the group in the first place, and whenever Ivy tries to impose restrictions on her, she threatens to leave.

Book 5, chapter 9
“I’m not being graded, attendance points aren’t being taken off, and no one’s paying me, so as I see it, I can come whenever I want.”

Max tends to be down on himself and chalk up his powers as insignificant next to everyone else’s, and sometimes he plays the “I’m inferior and I shouldn’t be here” card, which annoys Ivy.

Book 5, chapter 14
“I just know I have doubts about whether I’d be a good superhero. Lifting ten pounds on a good day won’t earn me a bravery medal. I joined the group because of its original purpose, helping me feel at home. Selfish, maybe, but I still need that. Since I’m not really a big enough deal to get involved in anything serious, should I just quit coming?”

Skyler is an interesting case, because sometimes the information she throws in Ivy’s face is humiliating. She’s very good at making her point when Ivy is being a hypocrite, and it’s difficult to be a strong president if one of the underlings is always undermining everything she says.

Book 5, chapter 14
“Ivy, you didn’t always like the idea of helping others with your powers. Just think about it.” . . . “You can hardly believe you were once ‘selfish’ enough to keep your powers serving your own interests, right? And that was just a couple weeks ago, that was your attitude.”

Nina is the most difficult member, though—even though she is also usually the most unassuming on the outside. Ivy feels in direct competition with Nina for “leader” of the group, because she’s becoming a little bit bratty over her ability to know things and has occasionally made Ivy feel as though she’s just a figurehead; “we all know who’s really running the show” is the attitude Ivy gets sometimes.

Book 4, chapter 45
“You’re so impulsive. You get mad or frustrated and you act without thinkin’. You’re gettin’ better but then once in a while you act like a baby.” . . . “Don’t you ever say ‘please’?”

Ivy is still learning how to deal with different kinds of authority as well as trying to get people to respect her authority. This will also develop as she does. For now, as far as authority goes, she is definitely not the person to cross.