51 pages • 1 hour read
Breathe and Count Back from Ten
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Personal and Sexual Autonomy
Throughout her life, Verónica has been denied autonomy because of her disability and her parents’ concern for her. They also have traditional views on femininity and sexuality and worry about being deported. Verónica describes the way her parents treat her: “They treat me like a fragile package no one should ever dare touch or open. All these rules, left and right, when I’m the one who knows what my body can and can’t handle” (11). At 17, Verónica is almost an adult and ready to become a fuller, more independent version of herself, but her parents resist the change. They are particularly harsh in communicating their values, shaming Verónica for being with a boy in a hot tub (even though she was being assaulted) and for being seen with Alex. Verónica notes her parents’ one-dimensional view of sexuality at her age: “In the eyes of my parents, it doesn’t matter what I choose to do with my body, it only matters that I do what they think is right. As if girls don’t get to have a say. As if it’s not really my body at all” (270). They constantly remind her of the risk of pregnancy and what people think of promiscuous women, and Papi implies she is promiscuous when he finds her with Alex. Verónica as a result sneaks out and lies to her parents to see him. Additionally, she feels she has to lie to her parents to take her dream job as a mermaid at Mermaid Cove: “If it weren’t for me bending the truth a little, I’d have no life that’s mine, no mistakes to claim as my own to learn from, just commandments we’re expected to follow without question, rules that teach me nothing about myself at all” (190). Unlike her parents, Alex encourages Verónica’s autonomy. He allows her to reach her own decisions in her own time and seems genuinely interested in seeing the world from her point of view. Through Alex, Verónica discovers her sexuality and the thrill of having control over her body and what she wants.
Verónica’s conflicts with her parents and desire to be with Alex are not the only sources of her desire for autonomy. Verónica also wants autonomy because she has been held back by her disability. Independence and strength are especially important and rewarding to her because they signal that she can take care of herself and her body. Verónica loves her body despite her disability, noting, “My body is a fluid thing. Sometimes it’s complicated and inconsistent, but it makes sense because it’s mine. My choices. My comfort. My decisions. If only” (63). Mermaiding is exactly what brings Verónica this sense of autonomy, particularly when she is given the opportunity to create her own showcase: “My words. My movements. My voice. I’ll have to own all of it” (266). Mermaiding gives Verónica the confidence to tell her parents what she wants, to accept her disability as a neutral part of herself, and to discover her potential as a mermaid and creative artist. Swimming and being in the water give Verónica power and control over her disability as well. Verónica’s control over when she has hip replacement surgery is a confirmation that she is becoming an adult and competent to make her own decisions: “One day, the doctors will cut my scars open again and replace this part of me that’s been flawed and pained and mine all my life. I want to choose that day. I want to choose all my days” (340). It is the powerful affirmation that she needs to enter adulthood with confidence and excitement.
Living with Disability
Verónica lives with hip dysplasia, a condition she was born with in which the femoral head in her left hip does not align with the pelvic bone. She has been through several surgeries throughout her life, all of which helped to an extent but did not solve her pain or inability to perform certain physical movements. After a major surgery when she was a child, Verónica was in a cast for months, and her leg atrophied. The doctor recommended that she swim to gain her muscle mass back, and ever since, Verónica has been emotionally and physically bonded with the water.
In the opening to her story, Verónica compares the experience of being under anesthesia, in which she has no control and is vulnerable to the world, to the power, control, and freedom she feels in the water. All her life, she has been treated as fragile. She’s been patronized, coddled, and lied to about the full nature of her condition. Verónica, 17 now, is tired of being defined by categories instead of being seen as a whole person. Her best friend, Leslie, and her new boyfriend, Alex, are the only people who see her for who she is, not for her disability. Verónica experiences all forms of ableism, including the overprotection she gets from her parents, the discrimination she experiences in her daily life, and the erasure of her scars from the photograph at Mermaid Cove. Verónica proves herself and everyone else wrong when she performs perfectly at her audition and succeeds in making the team. It is not despite her disability that she succeeds; instead, her disability is largely what led her to become such a skilled swimmer. After a summer at Mermaid Cove, Verónica starts to see how others see her disability:
Maybe the ‘magic’ isn’t just about believing in mermaids; it’s about believing people like me don’t exist. Like maybe admitting I’ve needed crutches dispels the myths we want to believe about people. That we’re not perfect. That our bodies have needs. That this doesn’t make us any less real. Any less human (228).
She comes to accept her flaws rather than fight them. Verónica also learns that she will have to have hip replacement surgery someday, and she starts to mourn the loss of the hip she has always known, flaws and all:
One day they’ll take the dying bone I’ve always lived with and replace it with a ghost of itself, a foreign object my body’s meant to welcome as its own. What if it doesn’t? What if the new joint doesn’t fit in any better than the old? What if I have to relearn to walk in it? What if its rhythm is one I can’t recognize, a language I can’t even speak? What if replacement doesn’t fix displacement, and this is how I was always meant to be? (187-88).
In addition to the daunting prospect of major surgery, Verónica grapples with her relationship to the “foreign object.” It’s taken her 17 years to adapt and accept her imperfect hip, and she is daunted by the prospect of an entirely new process of adaptation and acceptance.
Words and Their Meanings
All of her life, Verónica has been defined—and limited—by words, words spoken by her parents, her peers, her doctors, and others around her. Verónica’s parents do not directly call her names, but they imply that if she continues to be seen with boys, people will view her as a “puta” or a promiscuous woman. Papi tells Verónica that mermaiding is just a form of sex work, and he constantly warns her that she will get pregnant and be seen as low by those around her if she is seen with boys. Verónica’s sensitivity to words is obvious when she reacts harshly to Dani’s casual use of the word “lame,” accusing Dani of lacking consideration and noting, “I know language doesn’t evolve by accident” (67). When Verónica tells Alex about what happened with Jeremy, he tells her that he is sorry she was violated in such a way. Again, Verónica takes stock of this word, knowing how heavy its connotation can be:
But violate? In Spanish, violar is a word I learned young, a word that Mami said meant the worst thing a man can do to a woman after we heard it on the news. In English, there’s this whole range, and I don’t know where that night falls within it. So I haven’t wanted to use that word. I wish I could not even go near it. It’s always spoken with the implication that people just let things happen to them (151).
When Verónica was 11 years old, a tutor suggested she take control of words and what they mean by creating her own definitions. Through this exercise, Verónica learns that the meaning of words changes based on who is using them and in what way—and on how the receiver interprets them. She learns that she can have control over how she reacts to the words people use and whether she lets them define her in the way they want them to: “It turns out words don’t just have meaning, they’re given meaning. It turns out that we define things by how we see then. By how we feel about them” (67). At the beginning of each chapter, Verónica lists an important word that relates to the events of the chapter and to her own experiences and growth. Each has a classic definition, and underneath, Verónica’s definition of the word. For example, Verónica defines “Sirena” as “a calling that reverberates inside you, impossible to ignore” (24), hinting at her dream of becoming a mermaid. In the novel’s conclusion, Verónica realizes that she still has a great deal to figure out in terms of what words mean to her: “I don’t know what fine looks like yet, for me” (340). Her problems are not totally resolved, but she has gained new confidence and an assurance that she will define her own path and her own personhood from now on.
Unlock all 51 pages of this Study Guide
Plus, gain access to 9,100+ more expert-written Study Guides.
Including features: