Turtles All the Way Down by John Green

“Okay,” I said.

“Love you, Aza.”

“I love you, too, Mom.” I wanted to say more, to find a way to express the magnetic poles of my love for my mother: thank you I’m sorry thank you I’m sorry. But I couldn’t bring myself to, and anyway, the bell had rung.

—

Before I could get to history, Mychal intercepted me. “Hey, how’s it going?” he asked.

“I’m okay, you?”

“Daisy and I broke up.”

“I heard.”

“I’m kinda devastated.”

“Sorry.”

“And she isn’t even upset about it, which just makes me feel pathetic. She thinks I should get over it, but everything reminds me of her, Holmesy, and seeing her ignore me, not show up to lunch, all that—can you, um, talk to her for me?”

Right then, I spotted Daisy halfway down the crowded hallway, her head down. “Daisy!” I shouted. She kept walking, so I yelled again, louder. She looked up and picked her way toward us through the crowd.

I pulled her and Mychal together. “Both of you can talk to me about each other, but you can’t talk to each other about each other. And you’re going to fix that, because it’s annoying. Cool? Cool. I have to go to history.”

Daisy texted me during class. Thanks for that. We’ve decided to just be friends.

Me: Cool.

Her: But the kind of friends who kiss right after deciding to just be friends.

Me: I’m sure this will work out perfectly.

Her: Everything always does.

Since I had my phone out, and we were watching a video in class anyway, I decided to text Davis. Sorry not to reply for so long. Hi. I miss you.

He wrote back immediately. When can I see you?

Me: Tomorrow?

Him: Seven at Applebee’s?

Me: Sounds good.

TWENTY-TWO

I THOUGHT I’D BE FINE driving Mom’s silver Toyota Camry to Applebee’s that night, but I couldn’t shake memories of the accident. It seemed surreal and miraculous to me that so many cars could drive past one another without colliding, and I felt certain that each set of headlights headed my way would inevitably veer into my path. Remembered the crunching sound of Harold’s death, the silence that followed, the agony in my ribs. Thought about the biggest part being the part that hurts, about my dad’s phone, gone forever. Tried to let myself have the thoughts, because to deny them was to just let them take over. It sort of worked—like everything else.

I made it to Applebee’s fifteen minutes early. Davis was already there, and he hugged me in the entryway before we got seated. A thought appeared in my mind undeniable as the sun in a clear sky: He’s going to want to put his bacteria in your mouth.

“Hi,” I said.

“I missed you,” he said.

After the nervous-making car trip, my brain was revving up. I told myself that having a thought was not dangerous, that thoughts aren’t actions, that thoughts are just thoughts.

Dr. Karen Singh liked to say that an unwanted thought was like a car driving past you when you’re standing on the side of the road, and I told myself I didn’t have to get into that car, that my moment of choice was not whether to have the thought, but whether to be carried away by it.

And then I got in the car.

I sat down in the booth and instead of sitting across from me, he sat next to me, his hip against mine. “I talked to your mom a few times,” he said. “I think she’s coming around to me.”

Who cares if he wants his bacteria in my mouth? Kissing is nice. Kissing feels good. I want to kiss him. But you don’t want to get campylobacter. I won’t. You’ll be sick for weeks. Might have to take antibiotics. Stop. Then you’ll get C. diff. Or you’ll get Epstein-Barr from the campylobacter. Stop. That could paralyze you, all because you kissed him when you didn’t even actually want to because it’s fucking gross, inserting your tongue into someone else’s mouth. “Are you there?” he asked.

“What, yeah,” I said.

“I asked how you’re feeling.”

“Good,” I said. “Honestly not good right now, but good in general.”

“Why not good right now?”

“Can you sit across from me?”

“Um, yeah, of course.” He got up and moved around to the opposite bench, which made me feel better. For a moment, anyway.

“I can’t do this,” I said.

“Can’t do what?”

“This,” I said. “I can’t, Davis. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to. Like, I know you’re waiting for me to get better, and I really appreciate all your texts and everything. It’s . . . it’s incredibly sweet, but, like, this is probably what better looks like for me.”

“I like this you.”

“No, you don’t. You want to make out and sit on the same side of the table and do other normal couple things. Because of course you do.”

He didn’t say anything for a minute. “Maybe you just don’t find me attractive?”

“It’s not that,” I said.

“But maybe it is.”

“It’s not. It’s not that I don’t want to kiss you or that I don’t like kissing or whatever. I . . . my brain says that kissing is one of a bunch of things that will, like, kill me. Like, actually kill me. But it’s not even about dying, really—like, if I knew I was dying, and I kissed you good-bye, literally my last thought wouldn’t be about the fact that I was dying; it would be about the eighty million microbes that we’d just exchanged. I know that when you just touched me, it didn’t give me a disease, or it probably didn’t. God, I can’t even say that it definitely didn’t because I’m so fucking scared of it. I can’t even call it anything but it, you know? I just can’t.”