Counting By 7's Sparknotes

I am reading Counting By 7's by Holly Goldberg Sloan. In this novel we are introduced to a highly intelligent girl named Willow Chance, who lives in Bakersfield with her adoptive parents. She was always considered "gifted" from the beginning. She is about to start in a new school and hopes to make friends and "fit in". Willow takes her Standardized Test but is accused of cheating because she completed the test in only 17 minutes. She then gets sent to a counselor, Dell Duke, who has problems of his own. At the end of her session, she meets Mai Nguyen a sister of Quang-ha Ngyguen Nguyen who also attends counseling with Dell Duke. The two become friends. Willow comes home from school one day to find that her parents have been killed in a car crash. Pattie, Mai’s mom, invites her over to stay for a while so that the Social Security workers can find a place for Willow to stay. Since, so far, this is such a good book, I can’t put it down, and I have to resist going farther than two chapters.

I will now be doing a "close reading"
For someone grieving, moving forward is the challenge. Because after extreme loss, you want to go back. Maybe that's why I don't calculate anything now. I can only count in the negative space. I'm on a different planet now. I only speak when I absolutely have to. Otherwise, I do my best to be invisible and stay out of the way. No matter how hard I try, other people do not understand because I am incapable of communication. And that is why the deepest form of pain comes out as silence (pg. 117)." I think that this quote really represents how she feels about her life now that her parents have died. She's off onto her own now, and she doesn't want to come back to