Turtles All the Way Down by John Green

“You should write a response,” he said. “To Yeats.”

“I’m not a poet,” I said.

“You talk like one,” he said. “Write down half the stuff you say and it would be a better poem than I’ve ever written.”

“You write poetry?”

“Not really. Nothing good.”

“Like what?” I asked. It was so much easier to talk to him in the dark, looking at the same sky instead of at each other. It felt like we didn’t have bodies, like we were just voices talking.

“If I ever write something I’m proud of, I’ll let you read it.”

“I like bad poetry,” I said.

“Please don’t make me share my dumb poems with you. Reading someone’s poetry is like seeing them naked.”

“So I’m basically saying I want to see you naked,” I said.

“They’re just stupid little things.”

“I want to hear one.”

“Okay, like, last year I wrote one called ‘Last Ducks of Autumn.’”

“And it goes . . .”

“The leaves are gone / you should be, too / I’d be gone if I were you / but then again, here I am / walking alone / in the frigid dawn.”

“I quite like that,” I said.

“I like short poems with weird rhyme schemes, because that’s what life is like.”

“That’s what life is like?” I was trying to get his meaning.

“Yeah. It rhymes, but not in the way you expect.”

I looked over at him. I suddenly wanted Davis badly enough that I no longer cared why I wanted him, whether what wanted him was capitalized or lowercase. I reached over, touched his cold cheek with my cold hand, and began to kiss him.

When we came up for air, I felt his hands on my waist, and he said, “I, uh, wow.”

I smirked at him. I liked feeling his body against mine, one of his hands tracing my spine. “Got any other poems?”

“I’ve been trying to write just couplets lately. Like, nature stuff. Like, ‘the daffodil knows more of spring / than roses know of anything.’”

“Yup, that works, too,” I said, and kissed him again. I felt my chest tighten, his cold lips and warm mouth, his hands pulling me closer to him through the layers of our coats.

I liked making out with so many layers on. Our breathing steamed up his glasses as we kissed, and he tried to take them off, but I pressed them up the bridge of his nose, and we were laughing together, and then he started kissing my neck, and a thought occurred to me: His tongue had been in my mouth.

I told myself to be in this moment, to let myself feel his warmth on my skin, but now his tongue was on my neck, wet and alive and microbial, and his hand was sneaking under my jacket, his cold fingers against my bare skin. It’s fine you’re fine just kiss him you need to check something it’s fine just be fucking normal check to see if his microbes stay in you billions of people kiss and don’t die just make sure his microbes aren’t going to permanently colonize you come on please stop this he could have campylobacter he could be a nonsymptomatic E. coli carrier get that and you’ll need antibiotics and then you’ll get C. diff and boom dead in four days please fucking stop just kiss him JUST CHECK TO MAKE SURE.

I pulled away.

“You okay?” he asked.

I nodded. “I just, just need a little air.” I sat up, turned away from him, pulled out my phone, and searched, “do bacteria of people you kiss stay inside your body,” and quickly scrolled through a couple pseudoscience results before getting to the one actual study done on the subject. Around eighty million microbes are exchanged on average per kiss, and “after six-month follow-up, human gut microbiomes appear to be modestly but consistently altered.”

His bacteria would be in me forever, eighty million of them, breeding and growing and joining my bacteria and producing God knows what.

I felt his hand on my shoulder. I spun around and squirmed away from him. My breath running away from me. Dots in my vision. You’re fine he’s not even the first boy you’ve kissed eighty million organisms in me forever calm down permanently altering the microbiome this is not rational you need to do something please there is a fix here please get to a bathroom. “What’s wrong?”

“Uh, nothing,” I said. “I, um, just need to use the restroom.”

I pulled my phone back out to reread the study but resisted the urge, clicked it shut and slid it back into my pocket. But no, I had to check to see if it had said modestly altered or moderately altered. I pulled out my phone again, and brought up the study. Modestly. Okay. Modestly is better than moderately. But consistently. Shit.

I felt nauseated and disgusting, but also pathetic; I knew how I looked to him. I knew that my crazy was no longer a quirk, a simple matter of a cracked finger pad. Now, it was an irritation, like it was to Daisy, like it was to anyone who got close to me.

I was cold, but started to sweat anyway. I zipped my jacket up to my chin as I walked toward the house. I didn’t want to run, but every second counted. Needed to get to a bathroom. Davis opened the back door for me and pointed me down a hallway toward a guest bathroom. I closed the door and locked it, shutting myself inside, and leaned against the countertop. I unzipped my jacket and stared at myself in the mirror. I took off the Band-Aid, opened up the cut with my thumbnail, then washed my hands and put on a new Band-Aid. I looked in the drawers beneath the sink for some mouthwash, but they didn’t have any, so in the end, I just swished cold water around in my mouth and spit it out.