The story opens with Rachel’s thoughts on age. These ruminations, presented in first-person, stream-of-consciousness-style narration, reveal that Rachel is a bright, thoughtful, and expressive young girl. Her observation that “the way you grow old is kind of like an onion or like the rings inside a tree trunk,” or like matryoshka dolls “that fit one inside the other, each year inside the next one” (Paragraph 3), demonstrates her capacity for deep reflection and imaginative thinking. Rachel shows further maturity in acknowledging that the path to adulthood is nonlinear; she notes that one day “you might say something stupid, and that’s the part of you that’s still ten,” or another day “maybe you will need to cry like if you’re three, and that’s okay” (Paragraph 2).

Of course, there is a difference between knowing something is true and experiencing it firsthand. Rachel is wise for her age, but her immaturity becomes apparent as the story unfolds. In her conflict over the red sweater with Mrs. Price, Rachel grows frustrated with her impotence and voicelessness, which she credits to her youth. She wishes she was 102 rather than 11, believing that then she’d “have known to what to say […] would’ve known how to tell [Mrs.