The Friendship War

At home, Grace digs buttons out of the family sewing kit, determined to catalogue their origins as best she can, because they each have a unique story to tell. With her brother’s help, she figures out that buttons are different from other objects because, whereas people keep other things because they will use them, “they keep [buttons] because they might” (50). This feels like a major breakthrough to Grace, and her brother proclaims that they are geniuses.

The next day, Grace decides to take some buttons to school and is surprised to find the other students on her bus also talking about buttons, even though they weren’t in her class or at her lunch table. At school, Ellie and a few other girls are admiring a bracelet that Ellie made from seashell buttons, and Grace decides to observe how people interact with buttons because her self-titled condition of “button fever” is gaining traction in the school. By the end of the day, she has observed 51 kids marveling at Ellie’s bracelet, which makes her conclude that her school “is going to see a dramatic increase of button fever” (58).