Turtles All the Way Down by John Green

I turned to her. “STOP TALKING. Jesus Christ, you haven’t shut up in ten years. I’m sorry it’s not fun hanging out with me because I’m stuck in my head so much, but imagine being actually stuck inside my head with no way out, with no way to ever take a break from it, because that’s my life. To use Mychal’s clever little analogy, imagine eating NOTHING BUT mustard, being stuck with mustard ALL THE TIME and if you hate me so much then stop asking me to—”

“HOLMESY!” she shouted, but too late. I looked up only in time to see that I’d kept accelerating while the traffic had slowed. I couldn’t even get my foot to the brake before we slammed into the SUV in front of us. A moment later, something slammed into us from behind. Tires screeching. Honking. Another crash, this one smaller. Then silence.

I was trying to catch my breath, but I couldn’t, because every breath hurt.

I swore, but it just came out as ahhhhggg. I reached for the door only to realize my seat belt was still on. I looked over at Daisy, who was looking back at me. “Are you okay!” she shouted. I realized I was groaning with each exhalation. My ears were ringing. “Yeah,” I said. “You?” The pain made me feel dizzy. Darkness encroached at the edge of my vision. “I think so,” she said. The world narrowed into a tunnel as I struggled for breath. “Stay in the car, Holmesy. You’re hurt. Do you have your phone? We gotta call 911.”

The phone. I unbuckled my seat belt and pushed my door open. I tried to stand, but the pain brought me back into Harold’s seat. Fuck. Harold. A woman wearing a business suit knelt down to my eye level. She told me not to move, but I had to. I lifted myself up, and the pain blinded me for a minute, but then the black dots scattered so I could see the damage.

Harold’s trunk was as crumpled as his hood—he looked like a seismograph reading, except for the passenger compartment, which was perfectly intact. He never failed me, not even when I failed him.

I leaned on Harold’s side as I staggered back to the trunk. I tried to lift the trunk gate, but it was crushed. I started pounding on the trunk with my hands, screaming with every breath, “Fuck oh God, oh God, oh God. He’s totaled. He’s totaled.”

“You’re kidding me,” Daisy said as she walked to the back of Harold. “You’re upset about the goddamned car? It’s a car, Holmesy. We almost died, and you’re worried about your car?”

I pounded on the trunk again, until Harold’s license plate slid off, but I couldn’t get it open.

“Are you crying about the car?”

I could see the latch; I just couldn’t get it pried open, and whenever I tried to lift, the pain in my ribs made my vision cloud up, but I finally wrested the trunk open enough to reach my arm inside. I fumbled around until I found my dad’s phone. The screen was shattered.

I held the power button to turn it on, but beneath the branches of broken glass, the screen only glowed a cloudy gray. I pulled myself back to the driver’s-side door and slumped into Harold’s seat, my forehead on the steering wheel.

I knew the pictures were backed up, that nothing had really been lost. But it was his phone, you know? He’d held it, talked into it. Taken my picture with it.

I ran my thumb across the shattered glass and cried until I felt a hand on my shoulder. “My name’s Franklin. You’ve been in a car accident. I’m a firefighter. Try not to move. An ambulance is on its way. What’s your name?”

“Aza. I’m not hurt.”

“Just hang tight for me, Aza. Do you know what day it is?”

“It’s my dad’s phone,” I said. “This is his phone, and . . .”

“Is this his car? Are you worried he’ll be upset? Aza, I’ve been doing this for a long time, and I can promise, your dad’s not mad at you. He’s relieved you’re okay.”

I felt like I was getting ripped apart from the inside, the supernova of my selves simultaneously exploding and collapsing. It hurt to cry, but I hadn’t cried in so long, and I didn’t really want to stop. “Where are you having pain?” he asked.

I pointed toward the right side of my rib cage. A woman approached, and they began a conversation about whether I’d need a backboard. I tried to say that I felt dizzy and then felt myself falling, even though there was really nowhere to fall.

—

I woke up staring at the ceiling of an ambulance, strapped to a backboard, a man holding an oxygen mask over my face, the sirens distant, my ears still ringing. Then falling again, down and down, and then on a hospital bed in a hallway, Mom over me, makeup dripping from her red eyes. “My baby, oh Lord. Baby, are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” I said. “I think I just cracked a rib or something. Dad’s phone is broken.”

“It’s okay. We have everything backed up. They called me and told me you were hurt but they didn’t tell me if you were . . .” she said, and then started crying. She sort of collapsed into Daisy, which is when I noticed Daisy was there, a red welt on her collarbone.

I turned away from them and looked up at the bright fluorescent light above my bed, feeling the hot tears on my face, and finally my mom said, “I can’t lose you, too.”

A woman came in and took me away to get a CT scan, and I was sort of relieved to be away from both my mom and Daisy for a while, not to feel the swirl of fear and guilt over being such a failure as a daughter and a friend.

“Car accident?” the woman asked as she pushed me past the word kindness painted in calligraphy on the wall.