Turtles All the Way Down by John Green

“Yeah,” I said. It seemed to me that one of the defining features of parents is that they don’t get paid to love you.

He asked me about my school day, and I told him I’d had a fight with Daisy. I asked about his day at school, and he said, “It was okay. There’s this rumor at school that I killed not only my dad, but also my mom . . . so. I don’t know. I shouldn’t let it get to me.”

“That would get to anyone.”

“I can take it, but I worry about Noah.”

“How is Noah?”

“He climbed into bed with me last night and just cried. I felt so bad I loaned him my Iron Man.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“He’s, just . . . I guess at some point, you realize that whoever takes care of you is just a person, and that they have no superpowers and can’t actually protect you from getting hurt. Which is one thing. But Noah is starting to understand that maybe the person he thought was a superhero turns out sort of to be the villain. And that really sucks. He keeps thinking Dad is going to come home and prove his innocence, and I don’t know how to tell him that, you know, Dad isn’t innocent.”

“Does the phrase ‘the jogger’s mouth’ mean anything to you?”

“No, but the cops asked me that, too. Said it was in Dad’s phone.”

“Yeah.”

“I mean, my father is many things—but a jogger is not one of them. He thinks exercise is irrelevant, because Tua is going to unlock the key to eternal life.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah, he believes Malik is going to be able to identify some factor in tuatara blood that makes them age slowly, and then he’s going to ‘cure death,’” Davis said, using air quotes. “That’s why his will leaves everything to Tua—he thinks he’s going to be remembered as the man who ended death.” I asked him if Tua would really get all of his dad’s money, and he laughed a little and said, “Everything. The business, the house, the property. I mean, Noah and I have plenty of money for college and everything—but we’re not gonna be rich.”

“If you have plenty of money for college and everything, you’re rich.”

“True. And Dad doesn’t owe us anything. I just wish he’d, you know, do the dad stuff. Take my brother to school in the morning, make sure he does his homework, not disappear in the middle of the night to escape prosecution, et cetera.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You say that a lot.”

“I feel it a lot.”

He looked up at me. “Have you ever been in love, Aza?”

“No. You?”

“No.” He glanced down at my plate, then said, “Okay, if neither of us is going to eat, we should probably go outside. Maybe we’ll catch a break in the clouds.”

—

We put our coats back on and walked outside. It was a windy night, and I tucked my head into my chest as we walked, but when I glanced over at Davis, he was looking up.

In the distance, I could see that two of the poolside recliners had been pulled out onto the golf course, near one of the flags marking a hole. The flag was whipping in the wind, and I could hear the white noise of traffic in the distance, but it was otherwise quiet, the cicadas and crickets silenced by the cold. We lay down on the loungers, next to each other but not touching, and looked up at the sky for a while. “Well, this is disappointing,” he said.

“But it’s still happening, right? Like, there is still a meteor shower. We just can’t see it.”

“Correct,” he said.

“So, what would it look like?” I asked.

“Huh?”

“If it weren’t cloudy, what would I be seeing?”

“Well.” He took his phone out and opened it up to some stargazing app. “So, over here in the northern sky is the constellation Draco,” he said, “which to me looks more like a kite than a dragon, but anyway, there would be meteors visible around here. There’s not much moon tonight, so you could probably see five or ten meteors an hour. Basically, we’re moving through dust left behind by this comet called Giacobini-Zinner, and it would be super beautiful and romantic if only we did not live in gloomy Indiana.”

“It is super beautiful and romantic,” I said. “We just can’t see it.”

I thought about him asking me if I’d ever been in love. It’s a weird phrase in English, in love, like it’s a sea you drown in or a town you live in. You don’t get to be in anything else—in friendship or in anger or in hope. All you can be in is love. And I wanted to tell him that even though I’d never been in love, I knew what it was like to be in a feeling, to be not just surrounded by it but also permeated by it, the way my grandmother talked about God being everywhere. When my thoughts spiraled, I was in the spiral, and of it. And I wanted to tell him that the idea of being in a feeling gave language to something I couldn’t describe before, created a form for it, but I couldn’t figure out how to say any of that out loud.

“I can’t tell if this is a regular silence or an awkward silence,” Davis said.

“What gets me about that poem ‘The Second Coming’ . . . you know how it talks about the widening spiral?”

“The widening gyre,” he corrected me. “‘Turning and turning in the widening gyre.’”

“Right, whatever, the widening gyre. But the really scary thing is not turning and turning in the widening gyre; it’s turning and turning in the tightening gyre. It’s getting sucked into a whirlpool that shrinks and shrinks and shrinks your world until you’re just spinning without moving, stuck inside a prison cell that is exactly the size of you, until eventually you realize that you’re not actually in a prison cell. You are the prison cell.”