Turtles All the Way Down by John Green

“I use the internet. I just don’t feel a need to, like, contribute to it.”

“It does feel like the internet already contains plenty of information,” Davis allowed.

“Wrong,” Daisy said. “For instance, there is very little high-quality romantic Chewbacca fic on the internet, and I am just one person, who can only write so much. The world needs Holmesy’s Wookiee love stories.” There was a brief pause in the conversation. I felt my arms prickling with nervousness, sweat glands threatening to burst open. And then they went back to talking, the conversation shifting this way and that, everyone telling stories, talking over one another, laughing. I tried to smile and shake my head at the right times, but I was always a moment behind the rest of them. They laughed because something was funny; I laughed because they had.

I didn’t feel hungry, but when our food arrived I picked at my veggie burger with a knife and fork to make it look like I was eating more than I could actually stomach. Eating quieted the conversation for a while, until Holly dropped off the check, which I picked up.

Davis reached across the table and put his hand on top of mine. “Please,” he said. “It is not an inconvenience to me.” I let him take it.

“We should do something,” Daisy said. I was ready to go home, eat something in private, and go to sleep. “Let’s go to a movie or something.”

“We can just watch one at my house,” Davis said. “We get all the movies.”

Mychal’s head tilted. “What do you mean you ‘get all the movies’?”

“I mean, we get all the movies that go to theaters. We have a screening room, and we . . . just pay for them or whatever. I actually don’t know how it works.”

“You mean, when a movie comes out in theaters, it . . . also comes out at your house?”

“Yeah,” Davis said. “When I was a kid, we had to have a projectionist come out, but now it’s all digital.”

“Like, inside your house?” Mychal asked, still confused.

“Yeah, I’ll show you,” Davis said.

Daisy looked over at me. “You up for it, Holmesy?” I contracted my face into a smile and nodded.

—

I drove Harold to Davis’s house; Daisy drove with Mychal in his parents’ minivan, and Davis led in his Escalade. Our little caravan headed west on Eighty-Sixth Street to Michigan Road, and then followed it down past Walmart, past the pawnshops and payday loan outfits to the gates of Davis’s estate across the road from the art museum. The Pickett estate wasn’t in a nice neighborhood, exactly, but it was so gigantic that it functioned as a neighborhood unto itself.

The gate opened, and we followed Davis to a parking lot beside the glass mansion. The house looked even more amazing in the dark. Through the walls, I could see the whole kitchen suffused with gold light.

Mychal ran up to me as I exited Harold. “Do you know—oh my God, I’ve always wanted to see this house. This is Tu-Quyen Pham, you know.”

“Who?”

“The architect,” he said. “Tu-Quyen Pham. She’s crazy famous. She’s only designed three residences in the U.S. Oh my God, I can’t believe I am seeing this.”

We followed him into the house, and Mychal exclaimed a series of artist names. “Pettibon! Picasso! Oh my God, that’s KERRY JAMES MARSHALL.” I only knew who Picasso was.

“Yeah, I actually pressed Dad to buy that one,” Davis said. “Couple years ago, he took me to an art fair in Miami Beach. I really love KJM’s work.” I noticed Noah was lying on the same couch, playing what appeared to be the same video game. “Noah, these are my friends. Friends, Noah.”

“’Sup,” Noah said.

“Is it okay if I just, like, walk around?” Mychal asked.

“Yeah, of course. Check out the Rauschenberg combine upstairs.”

“No way,” Mychal said, and charged up the stairs, Daisy trailing behind him.

I found myself pulled toward the painting that Mychal had called “Pettibon.” It was a colorful spiral, or maybe a multicolored rose, or a whirlpool. By some trick of the curved lines, my eyes got lost in the painting so that I kept having to refocus on tiny individual pieces of it. It didn’t feel like something I was looking at so much as something I was part of. I felt, and then dismissed, an urge to grab the painting off the wall and run away with it.

I jumped a little when Davis placed his hand on the small of my back. “Raymond Pettibon. He’s most famous for his paintings of surfers, but I like his spirals. He was a punk musician before he became an artist. He was in Black Flag before it was Black Flag.”

“I don’t know what Black Flag is,” I said.

He pulled out his phone and tapped around a bit, and then a screeching wave of sound, complete with a screaming, gravelly voice, filled the room from speakers above. “That’s Black Flag,” he said, then used his phone to stop the music. “Want to see the theater?”

I nodded, and he took me downstairs to the basement, except it wasn’t really a basement because the ceilings were like fifteen feet high. We walked down the hallway to a bookshelf lined with hardcover books. “My dad’s collection of first editions,” he said. “We’re not allowed to read any of them, of course. The oil from human hands damages them. But you can take out this one,” he said, and pointed at a hardcover copy of Tender Is the Night.

I reached for it, and the moment my hand touched the spine, the bookshelf parted in the middle and opened inward to reveal the theater, which had six stadium-style rows of black leather seats. “By F. Scott Fitzgerald,” Davis explained, “whose full name was Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald.” I didn’t say anything; I couldn’t get over the size of the movie screen. “It’s probably obvious how hard I’m trying to impress you,” he said.