The first time Ivy goes into the world—told in a flashback in Book 1—she has very little idea of what to expect. She knows that her abilities make her different from other people, but as far as looks go she has no idea what’s different about her, because the people she lives with are so radically different from her and each other that she doesn’t know what a standard is. So her first thoughts about “fitting in” are mostly just curiosity—she doesn’t yet have any self-consciousness or embarrassment.

Book 1, chapter 2
I noticed the adults were all around the same size, none tiny like Weaver and Thursday or really big like Dax. At least I fit in in that department. They all wore clothes and didn’t have fur except on their heads, that was a good sign. All different hair colors and styles, I couldn’t discern a standard for that, but quite a few had my same sort of honey-colored hair. Their bodies came in lots of shapes, mostly the same three or four colors, all that I saw had two legs, two arms, no wings or anything. I really did look a lot like them.

Later she gets a little bit self-conscious because when she met Robert he knew she wasn’t human at a glance, and she couldn’t tell what was strange about her.

I was just worried at that point that people might stare if they got a good look at me, and my first stirrings of self-consciousness were almost overwhelming after a lifetime without feeling it. Plus it was maddening to not know where their eyes would linger, I almost wanted to come out and ask Robert what about me didn’t match.

When she people-watches in the mall, she’s wondering about how to fit in, but more for practical purposes than for her own comfort. She doesn’t want to scare Nina’s parents when she meets them later in the day.

Book 1, chapter 4
I rarely saw anyone alone. Humans were very social creatures. Some of them of course had blonde hair like I did, but my hair was longer than most people’s. . . . It was hard to tell their eye colors because they all had such small eyes, but I’d seen people with green eyes before, though not quite my shade of green. . . . Some of the people had pictures drawn on their skin; I knew they were called tattoos. I wondered if it was weird not to have any. Some of the men had hairy faces. Lots of the women wore simple jewelry. I didn’t see any tall, skinny girls with garish plastic jewelry, pointed ears, and lots of braids. I could change some of those things easily, and others I couldn’t change at all.

She finally starts to feel self-conscious while talking to Joe at the gym, when he makes a comment assuming she’s from outer space. She feels like he’s looking at her and noticing everything that’s off-kilter.

Book 1, chapter 8
All of a sudden I felt like flying away or hiding under a rock. Where had this self-consciousness come from? I covered my face with my hands, not wanting him to look at me. . . .

Later in the book, Ivy goes to see Perry’s band perform, taking some of her roommates with her. Perry insists on evaluating their ability to pass for human so they don’t attract the wrong kind of attention in the club, and Ivy is shocked to find herself among the people for whom Perry is suggesting changes and cautions. She’d thought she was doing great passing for human.

Book 1, chapter 11
“You need to unbraid your hair. Those ears are too much.” (Perry)
“I know when you first walked into my restaurant to talk to me, I did a double take. You attract more attention than you think. And I guess in this case, that’s bad.” (Peyton)
I was a little upset by all this; I’d thought I would have an easier time passing myself off as human, especially with all my experience lately.

All of these fleeting feelings of self-consciousness are nothing compared to what she experiences at school in Book 2. Ivy knows very little about the culture, so in addition to dressing her up like a human, her friend Zoe suggests she pretend to be from a foreign country so that her many gaps in knowledge are understandable.

Book 2, chapter 5
I noticed an increasing number of girls traveling in and out of the room to use the toilets or to stand around gabbing while they put on their makeup. I watched them all, both interested and irrationally disgusted. I wondered how I would ever begin to think of them as my peers. They were on the average about three or four inches shorter than I was, but I could tell that every one of them had to wear a bra. That made me feel somewhat self-conscious. I was probably older than most of them, too. Maybe this was a bad idea, to pretend to be human when I hardly knew anything about them . . . I was diving headfirst into something almost completely unknown to me. I hoped I hadn’t just made the biggest mistake of my life.

In Ivy’s economics class, there is a girl named Laura who is unusually careless about what she says. Her comments make Ivy very uncomfortable:

“So . . . you from another planet or something?” . . . “Well, I’m sure you know as well as I do that you look a little different. Where you from?” . . . “Get outta here, Russians don’t look like you. No one looks like you.” . . . “I just wondered how come you look like a chick from a Japanese cartoon or something, you seriously got the biggest eyes I ever seen, almost like one of them cartoon aliens.”

Interestingly enough, Ivy finally realizes this girl is complimenting her when she comments that she could be a model, but she’s still uncomfortable talking about looking different and pushes to change the subject. She wonders if everyone is thinking this sort of thing about her but just isn’t rude enough to say so.

After she meets Andrea, Mandy, and Nicky, she feels a little more accepted, but also like she has to keep tighter wraps on her secrets or else she might lose them. She tries to observe their dressing styles and conversation so that she can blend in better. Later on in the story an older boy calls her a freak to her face, but she is relieved to know he’s referring to her fashion sense (she’s wearing a rather outlandish scarf in her hair), even though she’s also insulted. She feels a little alienated that her friends are obsessed with boys, but Andrea is not boy-crazy and backs her up, which makes her feel better. She gets invited to a sleepover, which makes her feel very accepted.

In encouraging Bailey to go to school, Ivy sees a part of herself reflected, and tries to help Bailey overcome it:

Book 2, chapter 14
“I went to school for a while . . . Ivy, they’ll mess with me. Just like they always did.”

After agreeing to go to school as leverage for a prank, Bailey actually ends up liking school and becoming more concerned about her own image of normality. When Ivy goes to watch a talent show and suspects a good stage magician of using real levitation in his act, she realizes she feels very alone in the world, and thinks about the magician:

Book 2, chapter 15
I found myself hoping he was like me, realizing suddenly that I really wished I wasn’t alone in the world like it had always seemed I was. All kinds of romantic ideas crashed down in my head, of being able to finally talk to someone who could compare notes with me and talk about what it had been like to grow up like this . . . images of being able to dance on the wind with someone else who could fly without wings. I wanted to ask him if he could pick up a truck. I wanted to ask him how being different made him feel. And I wanted to tell him my own answers to the same questions. I’d never actively longed for companionship like this, but now I definitely wanted it. I wanted to feel like I was the same as someone instead of being so mind-bogglingly different from everyone I’d ever met. Even though my stomach felt queasy, I knew that I would have to find out about this guy and if he was what I was, or my brain wouldn’t leave me alone for a good long time.

Of course, Jerry the magician isn’t telekinetic, and though he leads Ivy to meet Adam, she still feels pretty alone. Eventually her friends find out all of her secrets and accept her anyway, so that makes her happy, but she still can’t be herself at school. She finds that the student body is accepting this pretend person she’s become:

Book 2, chapter 17
I began to feel the other kids had accepted me as one of them, more or less. . . . I noticed that I’d stopped being treated as “the new kid,” and started just being me. Those who did take notice of me had started to do so for positive reasons, like my being recognized for my choir performances and for working hard in math.

Still, she recognizes the reality that she is not one of them:

It still felt very upsetting, knowing that as much as I tried to be like everyone else and seem like I was, I wouldn’t actually be. I could pretend, but in reality, I couldn’t be human any more than I could grow an extra finger.

After Ivy gets snagged in her bell tower prank and leaves the school in tears, she feels like she has to escape and goes on a singular quest to find herself. Alone flying around in nature—sometimes in very uncomfortable situations—Ivy has a long talk with herself and tries to define who she is.

Book 2, chapter 26
I couldn’t go back home because I wasn’t me anymore. I wasn’t Ivy . . . or Ivy wasn’t me, or someone else was Ivy. Or Ivy was somebody else. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be someone else or if I wanted to be me and stop having to be somebody else, but it was a sure thing that I definitely wasn’t sure who I was right then, and I knew I couldn’t face anyone else if I couldn’t find myself.

Book 2, chapter 27
I couldn’t deal with school again. I liked the work, I liked the socializing, but the fact was that I had to be someone else to do it. I’d never been Ivy there. I wanted to be. I didn’t want to keep returning to a place where I had to wear a pseudo-Ivy Halloween costume before I would be treated like a regular person. It was wrong. It was, and I knew it. And yet, there was no way to change it.

Book 2, chapter 28
This sort of thing would never stop happening to me. Every new person in my life would require a fight for their trust and understanding, and I would inevitably lose some of those battles. And maybe it wasn’t worth it to convince everyone I met that I wasn’t evil. No matter how many friends I acquired, there would also always be people who judged me as harmful just by looking at me. My eyes felt too tight as they filled with tears. I wished I was as inhuman as my looks, enough to not have emotions, so that I could just ignore what they thought and live my life having fun. But that wasn’t an option. I felt utterly defeated.

It was human nature, and I couldn’t expect them to not be human. Any more than they could expect me to not be whatever I was. I decided that since I couldn’t change them, I would have to learn to deal with them, and get real. Somehow I would have to learn to work around this, which was what I’d been doing for so long . . . only this time, I wanted a lot more from them. I wanted to join their culture, or at least live inside it and see what it was like to decide if I’d like to join it. At least to know that option was open to me; to at least have that chance.

Book 2, chapter 29
Was there really any place a person like me could “belong”? How could I fit in anywhere if I couldn’t even figure out what the hell I was? I could fly, did that make me a bird? But I could talk, did that make me a human? Since I could do both, did that mean I was something in between? If so, what? . . . If I was an in-between species, did that mean I was some kind of limbo person who should always be somewhere in the middle? Should I be living a free life like the birds did, or should I be educating myself because of the human part of me? Was I a human who could fly or a bird that could talk? I thought about who I was, really thought hard about it, and realized that I really was more human than anything else. This confused me more than ever, because I’d always thought of myself being on the fringe without it really bothering me. When it had started to bother me enough that I resented it, I’d thought educating myself would help, and it really had. Mostly, I was just glad to prove to everyone, including myself, that I really was intelligent enough to learn like anyone else. But when I tried to conclude that my place in life was with the world of humans and that I should get used to school, and living like I was normal, my stomach tied up in knots. Just thinking about what it felt like to deny my natural abilities made me feel physically ill.

Book 2, chapter 30
“I think everybody’s personality has a little bit to do with where they’re from and who their family is . . . and I had to kinda take those things out, you know? So no one could ask me about them. So every time I turned around I was lying to someone. I had to lie about my background . . . my upbringing, everything. For God’s sake, I don’t even have a last name, so I had to lie about that, too! I had to make up a fake personality and then be that person, and on top of all that, I couldn’t act natural.”

After she decides to quit school but goes back to return her books, she gets invited to participate in the chorus concert as a last hurrah. During this time, she realizes rumors have gotten all over the school about what she did, mostly because Thomas is popular and powerful around the school. She finds herself being confronted by Thomas’s goonies and ends up messing with them, for once not caring about fitting in:

Book 2, chapter 34
I was probably already a legend at this school, so I didn’t care. It was a cool distant feeling, one that I savored, finally feeling free to do what I wanted without worrying about the repercussions.

She finishes the book in this state, and for a while she doesn’t worry too much about how she fits in. She does, however, remain self-conscious about how she looks, especially when she performs in her new singing lessons:

Book 3, chapter 2
I envisioned what I must look like on the stage: An awkwardly stick-thin girl made too tall by wobbly heels, cloaked by a veil of blonde hair like she had something to hide.

Her voice teacher tries to convince her to put her hair back when she performs, but she adamantly refuses. Justine teases her a little bit for being so self-conscious, saying it’s not a big deal.

“Yeah, it’s no big deal, Justine, so you try being me for a while.”

Ivy doesn’t really start worrying about fitting in again until she has an unusual reaction to alcohol and wonders exactly how inhuman she is. She fears that there are a lot of surprises in her future, especially since she hasn’t hit normal puberty and is now wondering if she’s going to get something else. She discusses this possibility with Miss Margaret, who reassures her:

Book 3, chapter 19
“Well, chances are you’re just a normal human with a couple of differences, you know.”

At Miss Margaret’s suggestion, she decides to ask a doctor. Dr. Lowe tells her she’s most likely got a hormone problem but that drugs can be prescribed to correct it. Ivy insists that she wouldn’t take drugs because the doctors probably don’t understand her body, and she goes on to prove exactly how different she is by letting the doctor in on all her secrets.

Book 3, chapter 20
“I want to know what I am and why I’m like this.”

The doctor offers a different perspective:

“Your body is a human body with maybe a few differences. That doesn’t mean you’re not human.”

Thinking of herself as human is a bit of a shock to Ivy:

Book 3, chapter 22
I couldn’t get my mind off of what that doctor had told me the day before. She thought it was silly to consider myself non-human, yet I had been doing it since I could remember. I wondered if severing myself from the species altogether had really been too much. Was I really different enough? When I squinted at myself in the mirror, I almost looked human. And it wasn’t so bad, either. . . . I looked at my reflection some more. There was no denying that I was kind of funny-looking for a human, but it was equally undeniable that I could still pass as one of them.

Ivy starts having issues again when she’s counted as part of a group once more. As an essential member of Ruben’s tech crew, Ivy feels like she’s not really part of the group because her talent wasn’t earned or honed like all of the crew members’ were. When asked to take a picture with the group, Ivy rebels, explaining to Ruben:

Book 3, chapter 31
“I don’t feel like I belong in the picture. I might be needed in this play but I don’t feel like part of any crew.”

Ruben gives her some good advice to make her feel better:

“Remember, these guys have known each other for a while, some of them for over four years. You’re brand spanking new, so you’re bound to be on the outskirts for a while. It isn’t going to help if you purposely exclude yourself either, so come on.”

When Ivy lets a select group of the tech crew know how she’s doing her effects, she doesn’t feel comfortable with that either:

Book 3, chapter 29
I had a flash of self-consciousness suddenly, and I felt like I’d stood up and taken a piss on the table instead of just demonstrated my powers.

She ends up having to be coaxed into feeling better about herself by Ruben, who continues to help her with this issue through probably the rest of her life. He teaches her that whatever happens, he accepts her, and that is quite settling to her.

Book 3, chapter 36
With all the turmoil I’d had in my life, what with doubting and questioning myself and everything else, it was a relief to finally feel a little tranquility.

In Book 4, Ivy displays more of her self-consciousness about being in public, which Ruben thinks is funny:

Book 4, chapter 3
“You seriously have a complex, you need to get over it. Anyway, I think you have cute ears.”

She’s slowly starting to incorporate the human standards into her own opinions, and at this point even she sometimes thinks she looks strange:

Book 4, chapter 6
The points of my ears were sticking out through my sleep-matted hair, making me wince at how much I looked like a fairy-tale creature. I slipped all the knots out of my tresses and tucked them all behind my ears, watching the other me move. Glass Ivy was pale and scared-looking, with her big green eyes searching me for flaws. I suddenly looked funny to my own eyes, and I grabbed for my ball cap.

She begins to sometimes act jaded about the whole thing:

Book 4, chapter 8
“There are a lot of things wrong with me, so the easiest thing to do is just say ‘I’m not human’ and get on with my life, ya know?”

After meeting Max in chapter 13, Ivy feels sort of strange about having someone else around with a power something like hers, especially since he seems to be a little disturbed by how she looks as well. But after she teaches him to use his power anytime he wants to in chapter 15, she experiences some unforeseen emotions.

Book 4, chapter 15
Suddenly a sense of wonder hit me, and then a flash of curiosity. It had just dawned on me that Max was truly telekinetic, and that he was the only other person I’d met who was.

Book 4, chapter 16
It was something to get used to, for sure. For the first time I sympathized with the people who’d had to get used to me. Also it was strange to me to share my ability with someone else. In a way it made me happy, but at the same time it somehow made me feel like I was less special. There was another feeling I had about it, too, something resembling jealousy, which didn’t make sense since I was the one with the better power.

Max very quickly develops feelings of depression and alienation, though he’s glad to have Ivy to cling to:

Book 4, chapter 21
“Are we the only ones, Ivy? You and me?” . . . “It’s still foreign to me, Ivy, and most likely it always will be. I don’t think I’ll ever . . . totally get used to it, like you are.”

She gives him some simplified advice:

“It’s not good for a telekinetic to be ultra-sensitive about acceptance. You won’t get it from everybody, that’s just how it is.”

But the way they look at it is, at least they have each other:

Max: “Guess it’s just the two of us.”
Ivy: “It’s better than being one, I’ll tell ya that much.”

Ivy finding her family definitely throws a monkey wrench in her thought process. First of all, she has proof she’s human, and that makes her think about herself in a different way:

Book 4, chapter 20
“If my parents were normal, I’m obviously just a genetic freak, or a mutant or something . . . and that sounds so bad. I just kind of had the idea that I’d just appeared on the Earth without any parents, and I was just special. Now I think about the reasons, and . . . something had to have gone wrong to make me like this, if my parents were humans.”

Slowly she begins to accept everything that’s happened to her, but sometimes it really bothers her that she is the way she is and yet she came from normal human parents:

Book 4, chapter 42
I took off my hat and looked at my face. It just didn’t look real to me. . . . I didn’t feel like crying. I felt more like smashing the mirror. How could I have been born to human parents and still look like this? . . . Even with my hat on, the brim shielding my eyes and my hands in my pockets, I didn’t look human. Not by a long shot. Why did I care about that? I’d lived with it all my life, known I wasn’t really human. Why was it bothering me now? Maybe it was because I was doing things like trying to have a human family. . . . Why should I try to be like them? Why should I care if my face didn’t match? I must be changing, I thought. Things were different now. I’d looked in mirrors and noticed I looked weird before, but it had never really shocked me or bothered me to this extent. I’d gotten spooked when I met my own gaze, just like a lot of the humans I’d met had when we locked eyes. Maybe that meant I was becoming more human—maybe it meant my brain was starting to accept their standards of what people should look like, and my face didn’t fit. I used to like the way I looked, or at least I hadn’t minded it. Why did it bother me now . . . ?

After Ivy meets Nicholas, she has contact with everyone who is eventually going to make up the charter members of her Handprints group. Inspired by Ruben and his creativity workshops (and by Zeke’s friend Sharon’s mentioning of LGBT), Ivy has a strange dream that she’s teaching classes on artistic winds to other telekinetic people, and this is where her idea for Handprints comes from:

Book 4, chapter 41
I wished I could go back to sleep and slip back into that dream, with all those telekinetics that I was teaching. More than that, I wished those people were a reality, and that I could teach classes on how to use our talent. I thought about what it would be like, how we could share our feelings and experiences and advice on how to cope. I had a lot of advice to give, but I wanted to know someone else was feeling the way I did. I wished I had something like Ruben’s creativity workshop to connect with people like me, or like Sharon’s LGBT group. I wished I could help those people who found it hard to cope with the weird flukes of nature that fate had dealt them. I wished I could help Max and Nicholas, and Nina and Bailey, and everyone else like us that I’d never met. . . . And then the thought struck me. Maybe I could.

From there Ivy is happy to be creating a place where they can all belong, though Bailey seems reluctant to join because she’s afraid they’ll try to make her be so honest that no one will want to be her friend. Ivy explains it to her with a very good line:

Book 4, chapter 43
“I want humans to be comfortable with us even though they’re kind of raised to shy away from anything different. But they can’t be comfortable with us if we don’t help them understand us . . . if we just lie all the time, how will they ever trust us?”

The end of Book 4 has Ivy less concerned with “fitting in” herself as she is with feeling comfortable with what she is in relation to the world. That ends up being the mission statement of Handprints: Helping people with extraordinary abilities feel at ease in society. Unfortunately, one person turns that desire on its ear in Book 5: Ivy’s friend Todd.

Pretending to be normal out of necessity for a couple of interactions leads Ivy into feeling like Todd is treating her in a way she’s never been treated before. She thinks she’s finally glimpsing the world the way a normal girl would, and she finds herself liking it. Long after Todd has fulfilled his original purpose, Ivy remains friends with him because she likes how he makes her feel:

Book 5, chapter 4
I liked pretending I was normal, and I liked keeping a secret. It was inconvenient, yes. It was morally questionable, yes. But it felt good. Todd didn’t think I was weird, and he was voluntarily spending time with me. It was like living in a glamorous movie, being the girl next door. . . . I was really some freak who spent most of her time making a lifestyle and an identity out of her freakishness. My whole life was set up around being who and what I was, and now I was attracted to the part of me that could pretend I was someone else.

I realized that being one of them was fun. Going places and doing things without answering questions about my weight limit or being asked to provide free flights. Todd thought the most surprising thing about me was that I ate chocolate without puking it up and still looked anorexic, or maybe my anime eyes. There was no fear of me losing my temper and slamming him against the wall; he didn’t know I could. No annoying discomfort in my presence when I used my energy, because I wasn’t letting on that I had it. . . . He couldn’t see it on my face that I didn’t belong in this world.

Of course, she has a huge argument with herself about whether she should be doing this, considering the whole rest of her life is in opposition with how she’s acting with Todd:

I was Ivy, president of a group dedicated to making life easier for people like us, and hiding this went against all my basic principles, all my presidential advice. I would be a giant hypocrite if I pretended.

She finally decides that she can’t deny that she wants to keep what she has with Todd, and that lying to him is better than lying to herself. It’s not that she doesn’t think it’s wrong; it’s that she feels like she can’t help herself. Ruben has issues with this and tries to talk her out of it:

Book 5, chapter 8
“You can’t pretend to be something you’re not forever.”

She explains how she feels:

“I can’t help it, I want . . . I want them to think I’m normal, because if I’m normal I get to do things abnormal people can’t do!” . . . “Fitting in, feeling like you belong, not worrying that everyone knows you can kick their asses and hoping you won’t, not having to deal with their expectations and fears and stuff . . . but besides that stuff I know is true, there’s . . . well, all the stuff I haven’t discovered yet.” . . . “I feel like there’s still more things I’ll find out about being normal as I get more practice.”

Ivy also shares her problems with Zeke, who is less critical but still logically pessimistic about it:

Book 5, chapter 6
“Ivy, haven’t you already done that particular case of trial and error?” . . . “You’ve learned this lesson before. You’re not normal. You’re not a very good liar and you’re practically handicapped without your power. You’ve already been through this, with school, and your friends, and everything.”

She replies with a justification:

“I like that I’m normal to him, that I really am close enough to normal sometimes to get treated like one of you no questions asked. He makes me feel . . . makes me feel real.” . . . “I’m really part of the world, the real one, when I’m with him. There’s no chance he’s thinking I’m a fantasy creature or a figment of his imagination. He’s . . . he’s responding to me as a person, not as an idea, ya know? The real ‘who I am’ is all I am with him, I don’t have to be a telekinetic chick too.” . . . “I just want to know how a normal friendship develops, see if it’s better, see what I’m missing forever once I drop that bomb with everyone else.”

In the portion of Book 5 that’s already been written, Ivy has yet to tell Todd about herself, but after a few planned incidents, she will do so. His response will reinforce for her the seriousness of her situation when it comes to fitting in: Not everyone will always be accepting. And being that Ivy has a tough exterior but a very tender underside, she will probably be hurt by it all her life. No one ever said her life was easy. . . .